


Allegedly Superior Biology

by RockyMountainRattlesnake



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: BAMF Martha Jones, Chemistry, Episode: s03e10 Blink, Gen, Hard Sci-fi, Illnesses, Like harder than a diamond being compacted in the centre of jupiter levels of hard, Martha kicks ass, Period-Typical Racism, Science, Sick Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25888777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RockyMountainRattlesnake/pseuds/RockyMountainRattlesnake
Summary: While trapped in 1969, the Doctor falls ill with a mysterious sickness. With the Doctor's life in jeopardy, can Martha figure out what's wrong and find a cure in time to save him?Set during the events of Blink.Updates Fridays.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Martha Jones
Comments: 50
Kudos: 54





	1. Infection

Martha groaned and crawled out of bed, sighing as the raindrops splattered against the windows. Another day, another dollar. When she signed on for this life of adventure with this alien madman and his magic blue box, never did she think it’d end up with her stuck in 1969 working at a diner to make ends meet.

She stumbled into the bathroom and brushed her teeth- the sun was up, not that you could see it through the rainclouds, and she had to be at work in a few hours.

The smell of frying bacon suffused through their tiny, dingy flat, and she smiled. The Doctor was making breakfast. Thank goodness for small miracles.

She dressed and stepped out of the apartment’s only bedroom to see the Doctor in the kitchen, tending to the bacon with a small smile on his face. The apartment was two rooms, and the second room was strewn with all kinds of bits and bobs and parts and pieces- components for things, and a LOT of broken TV bits. The Doctor was tinkering constantly, trying to devise some way to speed up their trip home.

“Another week!” he said cheerfully- this plan of his, involving time loops and paradoxes and some girl called Sally Sparrow was apparently working, and he’d even managed to pin down a date for their return. Seven days.

Martha sighed and grabbed a chipped plate from the chipped cupboard. They had two plates, two forks, and two cups, and that was about it.

The Doctor levered some bacon onto her plate and gestured at the eggs sitting in their second pan- already cooked, and sitting on the dented aluminum forlornly. Martha brushed past him to get to it, accidentally brushing her elbow across the Doctor’s back. A small and easy touch in a kitchen as cramped as theirs.

He hissed and shrank away, shaking a little. Like the brief contact had burned, or something.

“Doctor?” Martha said with a frown, “Are you alright?”

He looked at her innocently.

“Oh, fine, fine. Brilliant, actually. Well, mostly brilliant. Well, not entirely brilliant. Just- itchy. Really, really, really itchy. Dunno why, it’s not like I haven’t done laundry or anything, we did it all last week-“

Martha quirked an eyebrow. Itchy?

“Any rash or swelling?” she said, stepping forward. Her fork hit her plate with a clink and she pressed a hand to his forehead. Corpse-cold, as per usual- a mean 20 degrees, Time Lord body temperature.

“No, no!” the Doctor said with a dismissive headshake, “You know me, Martha. Time Lord! Superior biology, you know that!. I’m not sick or anything, there’s just no way. It’s probably this flat, or maybe I need to replace my shirt or something. Who knows!”

Martha was unconvinced, but seeing as the Doctor was still babbling, she decided to say nothing.

* * *

  
  


Martha and the Doctor walked out the door to the block of flats together, falling on the dingy grey street under a dingy grey sky. The Doctor wrinkled his nose- he could smell the leaded gasoline in the air. The human that had invented that had done a horrible disservice to the entire world.

A young man was leaned against the brickwork, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. He turned his head as the pair walked by, scoffing at them.

“Morning, miss Martha…oh, and good morning… _“Doctor”,”_ he sniggered, cigarette bobbing as he spoke.

Martha rolled her eyes and gestured for the Doctor to keep walking. He, of course, didn’t.

“Morning, Martin,” the Doctor said evenly, “Not at the lab today?”

He was smiling, relaxed and happy- clearly, Martin’s jab had rolled right off, and the young blond man scowled in his obvious annoyance.

“No. I need to work on my thesis some more,” he muttered in his clipped accent. He took another drag of his smoke, eyes lingering on Martha- she pointedly looked away.

“Not a good idea, that,” the Doctor gestured obliquely at his cigarette, “Smoking when you’re in the medical field. You of all people should know what that stuff does to the human body! Not a good example for the children, is it?”

Martin sneered.

“Children? Children are not my problem. Children get sick, I find the cure, I get rich. That’s all I want to do with children.” He said, pulling his cigarette out of his mouth.

The Doctor opened his mouth to keep talking, and Martha just grabbed his arm and yanked him away.

“Yeah, that’s great, Martin. Best of luck with that. But we really have to get to work, or we’ll both be late.” She said, dragging the Doctor down the street with a dark scowl on her face.

“Bastard,” she muttered when they were out of earshot, “Who does he think he is, anyway?”

“I met a bloke like him once in Utah,” the Doctor said with a sigh, stuffing his hands in his pockets, “Gets all his A-levels and thinks he’s some hot shot. Or…whatever they have instead of A-levels in Quebec…”

“He’s just a grad student!” Martha growled, “And I bet I know more than him about medicine. I bet I do. I’m not even a full GP and I bet he knows NOTHING. He’s learning all the nothing they know in the sixties, and- and-“

She sighed, letting the anger drain out of her. A few blocks from their flat was the Doctor’s new workplace- JOSEPH’S TV REPAIR, the sign read. It wouldn’t do to let the anger carry with her to work. Seven more days, and they were home free. Seven more days, and she’d never have to talk to Martin Ward ever again.

The Doctor put an arm around her shoulder, giving her a bit of a squeeze- a half-hug. She could see the exasperation on his face.

“I know, Martha. But, come on! Chin up! It’s just one more week, right?” he beamed, and Martha nodded, reaching up to pat him on the back.

The Doctor sucked in a breath between clenched teeth and stiffened, just as they reached the front door of the shop.

“Still itchy?” Martha asked with a deep frown on her face. She’d need to keep track of this. Was he coming down with something?

“Naaaaah,” he said, “I’m fine, Martha. Time Lord, me! The pinnacle of genetic engineering. Whatever it is, I’ll have it sorted by the time my lunch break’s over. Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you tonight, yeah?”

Martha nodded, turning away with a lingering look at the Doctor.

She didn’t believe a single word coming out of his mouth.

* * *

The Doctor stepped into the shop with a tinkle of the bell, red chucks brushing against the well-swept linoleum floors. It wasn’t a large shop- the front part where the customers came to drop off their TVs was barely five paces across. The walls had TV’s tuned to various channels resting in a special shelving unit built just for them. Prices were listed, and a rack of components hung on the far wall behind the wooden store counter. Right next to the counter was a fish tank- a large aquarium, with a filter and aerator, a dozen colourful beta fish and other freshwater species swimming around happily.

While the rest of the shop was worn and scuffed, the aquarium was shiny and new, every piece the cutting edge of technology. A note had been taped to the side of the tank- “TAPPING THE GLASS MAKES US VERY SAD”- with a little frowny face under it. The Doctor chuckled- he’d seen the importance of the note on more than one occasion when families had come in to get something fixed or buy a new set.

“Doctor!” a heavily-accent, Irish-sounding voice thundered, “You’re three minutes late!”

He smiled, slightly forced, and ambled behind the counter and into the repair area. Wooden benches were strewn with tools, TV sets with numbers and notes about the repairs they needed taped to them, and in the middle of it all stood a redheaded man with a bushy beard and a piercing stare.

“Sorry about that, Joseph!” he said evenly, “Got a little caught up out front, you know how it is.”

“I’m not runnin’ a charity here,” Joseph said, folding his arms impassively, “We’re fifteen sets behind. Marv an’ the b’y’s are waitin’ on us ta get these sets fixed so they can start shippin’ them out, an’ you come in here, LATE!”

The Doctor just crouched down by one of the sets that Joseph had allocated to him to fix- the man’s anger was a little like a flare gun. A brilliant flash, and then gone a second later.

Still, ex-navy boys could be real sticklers for punctuality…

He grabbed one of the sets, hefting it up easily and lifting it up onto the workbench, doing his best to ignore the fiery itch that flashed across his back. He’d been lying to Martha- something wasn’t right. His skin felt horrible– sometime last night it had started to really itch, getting steadily more painful as the hours ticked by. He hadn’t wanted to wake her- humans needed so much more sleep than Time Lords. He only needed a kip once a week, while she needed one every single night and got extremely grouchy if he interrupted it for any reason.

A silly itch he couldn’t explain was sure to have Martha absolutely incandescent, especially if he’d woken her when the burning started- two in the morning, to be precise. Rose had once opined that nothing good in the whole of human history had ever happened between the hours of one to four AM, and the Doctor was mostly inclined to agree.

After all, Chernobyl’s main reactor had gone critical at what was it, 1:42 AM?

So, yes. Best not to bother Martha. And whatever was causing the itch, he’d soon have the TARDIS back- seven more days, he was sure of it. Hop into the medbay, flip on the scanners, perhaps chuck in that bath bomb he’d invented and have a nice soak in a medicated bubble bath. And that was assuming his advanced healing abilities didn’t just sort the problem out long before the TARDIS was back in his life.

So, really, best to ignore it and focus on work. Tinkering with things. Getting paid money to tinker with things and make repairs to old broken bits and pieces. If Jack was here, he’d call this a proper con. Joseph was paying him money to play with old electronics and his sonic screwdriver.

This was practically highway robbery. Poor sod. 

But it paid money, and that was good.

He moved to pull his sonic out of his trouser pocket, hissing in another breath when the fabric rippled across his chest. Ohhhh, that was really starting to smart…

He took a deep breath. Focus. Focus. He’d had a thousand times worse than this, and it was only for seven days. He’d walked halfway down Olympus Mons with a broken leg, this was a cakewalk compared to that ill-advised picnic.

Right. Okay. This TV. He twiddled the sonic to scan, running it over the device and checking the readings-

“Any chance I could have a go with da magic wand, me son?” Joseph chuckled, leaning into the Doctor’s space without warning. He jerked away from the human in surprise, forcing himself not to wince in pain- the burning was reaaaaally starting to get distracting, now.

“Can’t, sorry,” the Doctor replied with a grin, “Human history hangs on a knife edge as it is. I let you fix a few TV’s with it, you’ll derail all of time.”

Joseph shook his head.

“You’re a special one, b’y…” he said fondly, “Anyway. I gotta nip down ta da pet store ta get some Malachite Green. Watch da shop, yeah?”

“Malachite green?” the Doctor asked, putting the regular human screwdriver down and looking at his employer with a single raised eyebrow.

“Yeah. Captain Kidd’s got some spots, I reckon it might be Ich. Don’ wanna take any chances. He’s already in da hospital tank, I just needs ta treat da water.” Joseph rambled, grabbing his coat and heading for the door, “Watch da shop, I’ll be back in fifteen!”

He stepped out the door with a tinkling of the bell, and the Doctor shook his head. When Joseph started in on fishkeeping, he momentarily understood the look of bafflement his companions got when he started blabbering away about this or that.

The Doctor turned his attention back to the TV in front of him, biting his lip at the pain the motion caused.

He’d been resisting the urge to scratch for hours and hours now- it wouldn’t help, it’d just irritate his skin, it’d just- it’d just-

It felt like tiny needles were lancing his shoulders and back, a burning pain that swept in waves, and his resolve to scratch it was starting to waver, starting to- starting to-

Maybe…just…a little…

He reached up, tucking a hand under the back of his shirt collar, wormed it down under his undershirt, and gently scratched with his nails-

The Doctor locked up, eyes going wide.

Oh, this was bad.

This was very, very, VERY bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're off! Again. This is a short little snack of an adventure I've been tinkering with while working on the plans for my next behemoth of a Nine story. Hopefully you all enjoy some Ten and Martha SCIENTIFIC FUNTIMES. 
> 
> No, seriously. I did so much goddamn research. So, so much. So much that there'll be a bibliography at the end of this in APA format ~~because MLA can fucking blow me.~~ This is educational! Even with the preponderance of F-bombs!
> 
> Oh, and uh...I came up with the concept for this fic last November, and started writing it in December. As in, before the pandemic. And I've been sitting on it for a long, long time, because...well, I'm sure you can guess why I've been sitting on it so long. I finally got sick of having it rot in my documents folder, so here you all are. 
> 
> Let me know your thoughts! I love reading your comments.


	2. Incubation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for blood in this chapter. It's not a lot, but if you're really squeamish, heads up.

The bell above Joseph’s shop door tinkled as he strode back inside with a bag of malachite green in his arms.

“Doctor?” Joseph called, “Anyone come by?”

From the back, Joseph heard a low, pained moan.

His bushy brows shot up and he dropped the bag by the door, rushing back to the repairs area.

Under the light of the incandescent bulb, the Doctor was slumped on the table facefirst, shivering. Joseph was about to open his mouth to admonish him about turning up to work hungover-not that he’d done it before, but there was a first time for everything- when he noticed something on the Doctor’s fingertips.

His arm was dangling limply over the side of the table, and there was a reddish-brown smear across his fingers.

Blood.

“Doctor?” Joseph said cautiously, walking over and putting a hand on his shoulder.

The Doctor jerked up into a sitting position and screeched in pain, loud enough for Joseph to jump back a step in shock.

“Doctor?! Doctor, b’y, what’s wrong? Are ye hurt? What happened?!” Joseph was frantic, now, already mentally reciting his address for the ambulance people, when the Doctor turned his head very slowly to lock eyes with his boss.

“Sick,” he croaked, “Something’s…don’t…not right. Need…Need to go home…”

He started to struggle, then, with his jacket- every twist and twitch set off a fresh round of hissing, and Joseph surged forwards and helped him slip it off.

“Sick? How sick is sick?”

“Skin. My skin hurts.” The Doctor whimpered- before leaning forwards and hacking out one of the unhealthiest coughs Joseph had ever heard in his life. And he’d lost an uncle to tuberculosis.

Joseph took a deep breath. Well, he’d had a good run. The smart play would be, of course, to flee for the hills before he caught hyper-consumption. But that would entail leaving the Doctor to suffer. And that wasn’t how he was raised.

Joseph spun the Doctor around on his stool, reaching forward and fumbling with the buttons of his brown suit top.

“Why the fuck did ya come in ta work if ye knew ye was sick…” he muttered, getting the two of them undone and helping his employee slide out of the jacket- with a shudder from the Doctor.

“Didn’t…wasn’t…serious, this morning.” The Doctor croaked, swaying a little, and Joseph froze with the brown suit jacket in his hands.

Through the thin fabric of his employee’s blue dress shirt, he could see brownish stains soaking through in spots. Blood.

“I’s callin’ an ambulance,” Joseph said frantically, “You needs a doctor- a real one, an’ no mistake-“

“NO!”

Joseph was already two steps to the phone when the Doctor roared, sheer terror in his eyes and his rigid, recoiled posture.

“What? Don’ be stupid, ye needs some penicillin, don’t-“

“They’ll cut me up,” the Doctor whimpered, “I’m- I’m different. Inside. They’ll hack me apart. Joseph. Please, please don’t.”

The terror in the man’s eyes was…worrying. The resigned tone on his words suggested that this was something he’d dealt with before. Joseph put the phone back in its cradle slowly, mind racing.

“What- what are we gonna do, then? I’s not leavin’ ya here ta just- waste away in front of me!”

“Home,” the Doctor croaked, “I need to go home. I need- Martha. I need Martha and I need to go home.”

“Martha?” Joseph echoed, “Dat lady ye comes by here with?”

The Doctor nodded- and lapsed into another coughing fit.

Mulling it over, it didn’t take him long to reach a conclusion.

Joseph nodded once, marching up to the front of the shop and flipping the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

* * *

The Doctor could walk- barely. He leaned on the much shorter Joseph for the entire walk back to his flat, which fortunately was only a few blocks away.

And the entire time, he was mumbling about the most insane things.

“Need your address. Need to know a time nobody will bother you. Can’t…let you die of…if this is contagious with humans, I’ll have my ship back, I’ll come back…”

“Don’t talk like that, me son. I’s big and strong. Nothing’s gonna kill anybody. Keep walking. This the one?”

The Doctor craned his neck to look at the grim brick building, blinking a few times.

“Yes. Room…25.” He panted, and Joseph just nodded and lead him inside.

The walk up the stairs was agonizing, and the back of the Doctor’s shirt pulled up as they neared the first landing. Joseph caught a brief glimpse of something reddish and marred with streaks of an unhealthy white before they hit the wooden door of the second floor. The Doctor let go of his support and flopped against the door, fumbling it open- Joseph just barely caught his arm before he tumbled to the floor on the other side.

“First door. 25.” The Doctor croaked, and Joseph nodded and turned sharply to the right.

He pulled a key from a pinstriped pocket, jabbing it in the lock after a few misses- not too surprising, since even with Joseph taking most of his weight, he was swaying slightly.

The door swung inwards, and the two of them staggered into the grotty little flat with their shoes on, something that made Joseph internally wince a little.

The portly man lead the Doctor into the single bedroom, groaning internally at the rumpled ball of sheets that Martha had left behind. The Doctor flopped onto it gracelessly, faceup with his tie flicked over one shoulder. He leaned forwards and made a valiant effort to try and get his shirt unbuttoned, but to no avail. Joseph shook his head and undid the buttons of his employee’s dress shirt, helping the man sit up and pulling it off slowly.

He gasped.

All down the Doctor’s chest, his skin was...falling apart. Reddish cracks, weeping terracotta-red blood, all bordered by patches of strange whitish fluff that looked…oddly familiar. Joseph recoiled a little, as a piece of skin somewhere up on his chest sloughed off- it looked agonizingly painful.

And to make matters worse, the Doctor started hacking up his lungs again.

“Martha,” he croaked, “I need Martha.”

“Dat lady ye comes by with, right?” Joseph said, “Da black one?”

“Yes. Works at…Bridget’s Cafe. Just down the street from your shop. I need her. She’ll- she’ll know what to do.” The Doctor flopped back on the bed. Joseph stared at him.

“Bridget’s Cafe.” He echoed flatly, “Miss Martha is workin’ fer _that_ prize bitch?”

The Doctor whimpered and nodded.

“Fuck me sideways, b’y, you sure know how to pick ‘em…are you really, really sure you need her?” Joseph said, biting his lip.

“YES, JOSEPH MURPHY, YES I FUCKING DO! PLEASE!” The Doctor roared, his voice petering off into a whimper. 

Joseph blinked a few times and looked away, taking a deep breath.

“Alright. Fine. If you needs her, you needs her. Stay here an’ don’t- don’t move. Don’t scratch, either. I’ll be back in two ticks.” He charged out of the apartment as quickly as he could, slamming the door behind him and running the few steps to the stairs.

Joseph’s mind worked furiously. Whitish growths. He’d seen that before.

He had to stop by his shop.

* * *

Martha was just scribbling down the order of an elderly couple (who she strongly suspected were giving her the side-eye) when the door to the restaurant slammed open hard enough to rattle everyone’s plates.

“MARTHA?!” a thickly-accented voice boomed, “THERE A MARTHA JONES IN HERE?!”

It was more than a little surprising to see the Doctor’s boss filling the doorway with a wild look in his green eyes, swaggering in like he owned the place. His eyes instantly fell on her, and he walked over and started frantically waving his arms.

“Get out of that- whatever. We gotta go!” Joseph snapped, and Martha- not to mention the dozen other people in the café and Bridget herself- stared at him like he was mad.

“I’m, um, at work? Can it wait till after I’m done my shift-“

“No. No it can’t.” Joseph said frantically, “Yer Doctor’s sick with some- some fuckin’ weird illness an’ he said I should come get ya-“

Bridgit, the Café’s owner, stalked out from the kitchen and marched up to stare down the madman, arms folded.

“Murphy,” she snapped, “This is your first and last warning. Get out before I call the cops. I don’t care how hard you’ve been day drinking, but if you recall, you’re banned for life. Now get out of my shop!”

“Fuck off, Baker,” Joseph snapped, “I ain’t got time fer yer headmistress horseshit. There’s a man’s life in the balance and I need Miss Martha here right now-“

“Miss Jones is in the middle of her shift and I’m not letting her leave to go attend to some imagined emergency- Least of all with the likes of you. I know you’re a bit thick, Murphy, but GET OUT!”

The staredown continued for a few seconds, Joseph shaking his head and turning his attention back to Martha.

“Yeah, whatever, go shove a cod up yer fuckin’ cockhole. Look, Martha, come on, we gotta GO-“

“I can’t!” Martha said, waving her hands at the two confused diners in front of her, “Joseph, I’m sorry, but I can’t- It’s probably not that bad, whatever it is-“ She spared a glance over at Bridget, whose glare was only darkening with every second Joseph stayed in her presence. 

“His fuckin’ skin’s falling off!” Joseph yelled frantically, and at this, someone who hadn’t been served yet gagged, got up, and left.

Martha stared at him.

“That liar,” she muttered, “There WAS something wrong with him...”

“Yeah, yeah, sure! Whatever! Da b’y’s got white shit growin’ out of big cracks an’ he’s coughing hes lungs out, b’y! He said he needed ye. Specifically YOU.” Joseph said, staring into her eyes.

Martha took a deep breath and nodded.

She tore the elderly couple’s order off her notepad and marched it towards the kitchen window, clipping it to the wheel, and then walking towards the back of the restaurant.

“Where do you think you’re going, Miss Jones?!” Bridget snapped, “If you walk out on me, I’ll sack you. See if I don’t. You lazy, useless-“

“I quit.” Martha snapped, “Joseph? Meet me out front.”

* * *

To Martha’s annoyance, Joseph stopped by his shop on the way back to the flat, muttering something about a chemical he needed. He came back out a second later with a big bag in his arms, fumbling the lock to his shop closed before she could ask what was happening.

“Alright, what was all that about his skin falling off?” Martha asked worriedly, “What’s the bag for, what’s his symptoms- what’s happening, Joseph?”

“I don’t know.” Joseph said flatly, marching off down the street with a drilled efficiency, “I went out ta get some a’ dis for me fish tank, an’ when I came back the Doctor was facedown on his table an’ screaming in pain. I helped him back ta yer flat, got him undressed, an’-“ Joseph’s voice faltered, and he shuddered.

“His chest, b’y. His chest is all tore up, I don’t even- I don’t know. And he’s coughing. Bad.” Joseph shuddered, “Really don’t wanna catch tuberculosis…”

“It’s…probably not TB,” Martha said slowly, adjusting the bag she’d had just seconds to grab. She was still in her work uniform- Joseph hadn’t allowed her any time to change. And on top of that, she’d just been handed a medical case by an inexperienced layman on a man who wasn’t even human…

God damn it. She was not qualified for this shit.

Martha sighed as they stepped into the foyer of the apartment block, following Joseph up the stairs. He pulled out the Doctor’s key to their front door and deftly unlocked it.

Martha surged past him as Joseph waffled in the front entrance doing something. She was too preoccupied with the groans and moans of pain coming from the single bedroom.

A few steps past their closet and she was in the bedroom.

The Doctor was sprawled on his back, an arm thrown over his face. He was whimpering in pain, and it was quite easy to see why.

“I would kill for some PPE right now…” Martha muttered, taking a nervous step forwards and looking over the Doctor’s injuries.

“Martha,” the Doctor croaked, “Thank…Rassilon.”

“Doctor? I need you to tell me exactly when this started. What were your symptoms, what happened- I need to know everything.”

“Last night. 2:44 AM. My back started itching, bad. Didn’t start to burn until about…4 AM.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up!?”

“Humans. Humans get cranky when you don’t get enough sleep. Didn’t want to wake you for something so minor…”

Martha groaned.

“Burning pain all over your body isn’t ‘minor’, Doctor. If you don’t treat the minor things, they turn into major things…” she chided, squinting at the whitish tufts growing from some of the cracks in his skin. What the hell WAS that stuff?

Systemic infection was likely, especially if Joseph was right and the Doctor had been coughing. Quite possibly bacterial. If it was viral, the Doctor was fucked ten ways to Sunday. Where he hell was she going to get enough penicillin to fight this thing off? Did penicillin even work on Time Lords? She needed to identify this thing to properly treat it.

She needed to take a sample. And then she needed to analyze it somehow…

Martha ran into the kitchen to get a pair of rubber gloves, slipping them on and washing them in the sink with some dish soap and water. Ad-hoc PPE was infinitely better than no PPE at all. Who knew what this stuff was, or if it was infectious to humans?

A mask would really be ideal, but sadly they didn’t even have any cheesecloth kicking around. She was lucky enough to have the gloves.

Joseph watched her run past, stomping into the bedroom behind her with that blasted bag still under his arm. If she’d been in any fit state to notice, Martha might have realized that Joseph was in his socks.

“Uh,” Joseph said, scratching the back of his head with his free hand, “Miss Martha? What are you…?”

“Need to take a closer look, and I really don’t want to get this stuff, whatever it is, on my skin.” She replied, “I really need some kind of a lab or something to take some samples and diagnose this stuff…”

Martha gently touched one of the sores to check if it was full of pus or anything that would need to be drained or lanced, and the Doctor yelped in pain.

Someone stomped a few steps down the hall and banged on the front door.

“WILL YOU SHUT UP IN THERE!” Martin’s muffled voice howled through the pine wood, “I’M TRYING TO WRITE MY THESIS!”

Martha jerked up and whipped her head around, looking in the direction of their front door.

“Jackpot.” She muttered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinda sloppy, but we're getting there. Doctor Martha is a go. Hopefully you're all enjoying the story so far- it's not finished, because I'm wrestling with the demon that is chapter 5. I may need to split it into parts, which means my chapter naming is going to get messed up. Oh well. 
> 
> Let me know your thoughts! I'm glad everyone enjoyed the first chapter.


	3. Prodromal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a bit more gross stuff, lesions and growths, as well as some sample-taking. I personally have a medical phobia, so this is a heads-up. It's all fairly nondescript and non-graphic, but make up your own mind if you're okay with that.

Martin had his arms folded when Martha whipped the door open. He scowled and tapped his foot on the floor.

“Thought you two were employed. Look, whatever fucking shit you get up to in there, do it quietly. I have a day off, I thought, I’ll work on my thesis, and no. All I hear is screaming. Would it kill you to please-“

“We need your help.” Martha blurted out, and Martin blinked a few times.

“…My help?” he repeated slowly, staring at her.

“I need your lab. The one at the university. The Doctor’s sick, and I need- I need to diagnose it.” She said too quickly.

Martin sneered.

“You? Diagnose? What are you, his nurse?”

“No.” Martha snapped, “I’m a medical student, and my patient is sick. I need your help and your lab to save his life.”

Martin sniggered and shoved his way past her, toeing off his shoes automatically in the entrance. They fell right next to Joseph’s work-worn army boots, Martha noted dimly, and Martin strode into the bedroom.

“Alright, “Doctor”, what kind of stupid hangover have you- **_FUCK ME-!”_**

Martha stepped in behind him and folded her arms.

“I need your help.” She repeated, noting that Martin had gone very pale indeed.

“What’s dis fuckin’ frog doin’ in here? Swaggerin’ in, talkin’ like he owns da place-” Joseph stepped out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Dimly, Martha noted that the bathtub seemed to be running. Why the hell had he done that.

Martin’s scowl deepened the second the word “frog” left Joseph’s mouth. It only got more pronounced as the rant continued, and he narrowed his eyes.

He opened his mouth to say something that would probably set Joseph off, and Martha ran between them and held up a hand.

“Both of you, knock it off. Joseph, I don’t know what your problem is with the French, but just- put a sock in it until the Doctor’s better, got that? I don’t have time for this shit, and neither does he. This is Martin, he’s our neighbour, and we need his help.”

Joseph huffed, and Martin folded his arms.

“To answer his question, I’m studying medicine. And I’ll be the reason your fat ass makes it to seventy…Joseph.” Martin snapped, waving him off.

Martha sighed and cradled her head in her hands. Joseph looked about ten seconds from wringing Martin’s neck, and the only thing stopping him was Martha’s presence.

Martin edged closer to the Doctor, casting his eyes over the pattern of bleeding cracks and sloughed-off skin. The whitish stuff growing out of some of the wounds drew special attention, and he turned back to Martha.

“And you haven’t taken him to the hospital because…?” He said, raising an eyebrow, “This isn’t your job and this isn’t mine. You’re a waitress and I’m a pharmacist. I don’t do diagnosis.”

“No. No hospitals.” The Doctor croaked, “They’ll cut me up.”

Martin rolled his eyes. “Joy, another bloody conspiracy theorist…listen, “Doctor”, medical professionals don’t hack up corpses anymore-“

“He’s being serious. He’s- he’s different. On the inside. And some medications don’t work the same on him. We can’t take him to a hospital- they might kill him.” Martha said seriously, and Martin rolled his eyes.

“What, is he a space alien?” he sneered, “Little green man from outer space?”

Joseph opened his mouth to start thundering at Martin. The Doctor coughed and scowled. And before anyone could open their mouths, Martha opened her bag and pulled out her cellphone.

“Yes. He is a space alien. Yes. He can’t go to the hospital. And guess what? I’m not from around here either.” Martha said, holding up the phone, “Look.”

She handed it to him. Martin flipped it open and blinked a little in surprise as the screen lit up. He scanned over the numbers, pressing buttons and examining the antenna.

“That’s from the future. So am I. So is he. Don’t ask how, I’m not really sure either.” Martha said flatly, “If you help us, we’ll-“

“Drug recipe,” the Doctor croaked, “I’ll give you a drug recipe. Something…hasn’t been invented yet. You can…take the credit.”

Martin’s eyes lit up. He looked down at the phone in his hands, pressing the 5 key and watching as a small 5 appeared on the tiny LCD screen.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Very slowly, a big smile spread across his face. He carefully folded up Martha’s phone and handed it to her, then offered his hand for a handshake.

“Doctor Martha,” he said brightly, “My lab is at your disposal.”

* * *

Martha took ten seconds to sneak into the washroom to change out of her work clothes and into something a little more practical- the skirt and apron were honestly a bit silly, and she didn’t like them at all.

Bizarrely, the bathtub was still running- and it was nearly full. Martha turned off the tap and stared at the plug for a few seconds, wondering why the hell Joseph would fill the tub up. She debated pulling the plug for a few seconds, before shaking her head and sliding into her jeans. Questions for a later time. She’d leave it- Joseph probably had a damn good reason.

Martha emerged from the bathroom to a clattering in the kitchen. Joseph was stood by the stove, hands on his hips, staring at their largest cooking pot with the lid on like that would somehow speed up the boiling.

Joseph looked her up and down

“What are you…?” she wondered aloud, and Joseph rolled his eyes.

“The frog told me ta boil some water. He went off ta get a few sample jars from his.”

Martha nodded sharply. Right, samples. They needed to take samples of skin, hair, and those…whitish tufts growing out of the wounds. She stepped back into the bedroom, looking at the Doctor with concern in her eyes.

“We’re gonna take some samples,” she said carefully, “Martin’s going to drive me to his lab and we’ll…we’ll take a look. Any ideas what this might be?”

The Doctor shook his head.

“TARDIS…usually keeps me in tiptop shape. She’d know. In an instant, what was wrong…” he whimpered, his head falling back on the pillow.

Martha nodded.

“You’ll see her soon. A week, right? A week, and then we’re home.”

The Doctor chuckled, which turned into a hacking cough and a whimper of pain.

“Don’t know if I’ll make a week.” He whispered, closing his eyes.

Martha shook her head. “Don’t talk like that. We’ll get you through this. Martin’s just getting some sample jars from his flat, so he’ll be back and we’ll take them to his lab and get you diagnosed.”

The Doctor nodded, and then reached out for the crumpled pile of his clothes that Joseph had dumped in the corner of the room.

“You’ll need to sterilize the containers,” he croaked, “give me my sonic.”

“We’ve got a pot of water on the boil. That’ll do the same job-“

“Take too long. This really, really hurts…Don’t know how much longer I can take this.” The Doctor finally admitted, “Get me my sonic.”

Martha nodded and knelt by his overcoat, pulling the screwdriver out of one of the pockets and placing it in his outstretched hand.

The Doctor hissed as he pulled it back towards himself, one hand coming up to adjust the settings. With a few different hums and whirrs, it was set, and he handed it to her.

“Sterilization. Uses ultrasonic cleaning with air as a fluid, coupled with UV light from the end. Don’t wave it on your skin or your eyes.”

Martha nodded and stepped out of the bedroom.

“Don’t need the pot, Joseph. We’ve got something better.” She held up the sonic, and he just quirked a bushy eyebrow.

“Da magic wand? Fuck, it sterilizes shit too? S’there anything it can’t do?” He wondered aloud.

“IT DOESN’T DO WOOD!” The Doctor shouted from the bedroom, before lapsing into another coughing fit.

“Apparently, it doesn’t do wood,” Martha repeated dryly, folding her arms- and looking down.

“…Joseph? Why are you in socks?”

He looked down at his stocking feet, and then back up, a look of honest confusion on his face.

“…Because I’s in your house?” he said, and Martha blinked a few times.

“…Okay…?” she started, “And that’s- why? I didn’t ask you to-“

Joseph shrugged.

“It’s only polite.” He replied, “That froggy fucker’s done it too. Least he’s got SOME manners-“

Martha was about to comment on this further when Martin barged back into the flat with several armfuls of small bowls, cups, jars, and test tubes.

“Found it! Glad I got some equipment from the lab next door. Okay, old man, you got that water on the boil- alright, good, it’s just ready now. Talk about good timing.” Martin put his bag of jars on the counter, already unscrewing the tops and preparing to throw them in, when Martha stepped forward.

“Don’t need to boil them. This’ll work better.” She waved the sonic at him, and then more specifically at all the sample containers- going over each one in turn.

Martin stared at her.

“No.” Martin said firmly, “You don’t get to wave your magic future-stick at them and call it good. There’s no evidence I’ve seen that magic future-sticks can sterilize at all. We boil them and we make sure it’s done right.” He yanked the jar out of Martha’s hands, throwing the tiny pot, its lid, and four or five of its brothers into the boiling water, along with a couple of little metal tools.

Martha blinked a few times in confusion. Odd. Normally people just accepted the sonic could do anything.

She sighed and checked her watch. No use arguing with them now.

* * *

Martin had found some proper rubber gloves in his apartment, as well as a pair of masks. That would have been nice to have before she’d started poking at the Doctor’s illness with their kitchen gloves, but whatever.

She leaned forwards and scraped away some of the skin and the whitish stuff with the cleaned metal poker Martin had found, scooping the sample into her jar and twisting the lid on.

“This better not infect humans,” she warned him half-heartedly, and the Doctor just shook his head and coughed.

“Find out what it is. Then call me. I’ll…I know how to make…cures.” He croaked. “Hope your lab has chemicals…”

Martin huffed. “My lab is incredibly well-stocked, thank you!”

Martha opened another sample jar and took a scraping of the whitish filaments from one of the lesions. The Doctor groaned in pain, and Martha looked at him apologetically.

“Sorry….” She murmured.

“It’s fine.” The Doctor said with a groan.

“Alright, so, we got them all, then?” Martin said, folding his arms, “We take them to my lab, you take a look under a microscope, then we go buy him some penicillin and we’re done. Easy.”

“It might not be bacterial,” Martha said with concern, “Could be viral. We don’t know what it is. That’s why we’ve got to test for it.”

“I think it’s a parasite.” Joseph said suddenly, and everyone stared at him.

“Are you a doctor?” Martin snapped, “Quiet, old man. We know more than you do.”

“I’s being serious. Look at da growths on his skin. It looks kinda like Ich.”

“Like what?” Martha replied blankly, “What the hell’s that?”

“It’s- it’s a disease in fish. Freshwater fish can get these white growths on ‘em, an’ they look…a lot like that. An’ their scales fall off, and it can kill them. I got some malachite green ‘cause me blue Betta’s got it… and what the Doctor’s got looks a _lot_ like it.”

Martha stopped and stared at the whitish patches again, eyes going wide.

Ich. In fish.

A cold-blooded animal.

Time Lords.

Core temperature: twenty degrees Celsius.

“Oh, Doctor,” she muttered, “You and your bloody superior biology…”

“Fascinating,” Martin said dryly, “How about you leave the figuring out to the experts in the room, no? Stay here and make sure he doesn’t die. We’ll be back. Miss Martha? Do you have the samples?”

Martha nodded and stood up, tucking the sample jars in her bag. She spared a sympathetic glance back at the Doctor.

“Hold on. We’ll be back soon.”

The Doctor nodded.

Martha and Martin left without too much more preamble, Martin taking a minute to slip back into his trendy shoes before following Martha out the door.

With them gone, Joseph walked into the washroom with his bag of malachite green, eyes locked on the bathtub.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOOOHH, WE'RE HALFWAY THEEEEEERE, _WHOOOAH-OHHH,_ LEMON ON A PEAAAAAR
> 
> Sorry. Okay, so, anyway, yeah. Halfway there! Woo! Hopefully you're all enjoying the story so far. School's started again, but in a really weird way, so...? Possibly time to write? Who knows, honestly. I will stick to my schedule come hell or high water, though. 
> 
> If you liked it, hated it, or whatever else, let me know in the comments! I hope you're enjoying this, because we're about to get full-tilt into the sciencey shit next chapter. Whee!


	4. Illness

“Come on, come on!” Martin snapped, gesturing at the Lotus parked a few steps down from the front of their apartment building. The car was brand new, gleaming a bright blue even in the rain; Martha had often wondered about that car, and now she didn’t need to ask.

She hopped into the passenger seat, the samples clinking in her bag as she sat it on her lap. Automatically, she reached for the seatbelt over her shoulder, but to her surprise, it wasn’t there; looking down, Martha raised an eyebrow and snapped her lap belt into place.

Martin jabbed the keys in the ignition and fired the car up- without doing up his own seatbelt, Martha noted dimly.

“Should buckle up,” she mumbled, and Martin rolled his eyes.

“You’re not my mother. Don’t tell me what to do.” He grumbled, signalling out and pulling into traffic.

To Martha’s surprise, Martin actually drove fairly carefully; he signaled, shoulder-checked, and generally treated his car and the people on it with a good deal of respect. She watched him carefully brake for a red light so the stop wasn’t abrupt, and blinked a few times.

“So, uh,” she asked, “Where’d…where’d you get the car? It’s pretty nice.”

“Birthday present from my father,” Martin replied, “Papa owns the Labatt plant in Montreal, so…”

Ah.

Martha nodded a few times, even more surprised that Martin was being careful; a car for a birthday gift from Daddy Dearest, and the twentysomething grad student _wasn’t_ driving it like a suicidal loon?

Wonders would truly never cease.

That all ended when they pulled up to the next stoplight and Martin fished a cigarette out of his pocket, sparking it up in the cigarette lighter and starting to smoke it as they pulled away. Considering his car was a manual, it was quite the feat to watch him change gears, steer, and puff away all at the same time. Would have been more of a feat if it wasn’t currently GASSING HER OUT-

She coughed, several times. The acrid smell of tobacco was making her eyes water, but there wasn’t a whole lot she could do- it was Martin’s car, and Martin’s lab, and so long as she could diagnose what was wrong with the Doctor, she’d have to grin and bear it.

It took far, far longer than Martha would have liked for them to pull up outside an austere-looking brick building some ways from their apartment. UCL MILL HILL one of the signs read, and Martin parallel-parked with a flourish in a convenient spot by the sidewalk.

Martha hopped out, gasping for air in the downpour, and slammed the door behind her.

“Alright, miss Martha,” Martin said, flinging his smoke down into a puddle and letting it hiss out, “Follow me. Let’s see if you really are a doctor, eh?”

* * *

Joseph tromped over to the bathtub with the sack of malachite green in his arms, checking the directions on the side and then carefully shaking a portion out into the tub. The bath was old and the enamel was chipping away in places, but the water was warm and the tub bottom looked sound, so there wasn’t much he could complain about.

The tub took on a faint bluish tint, much more obvious against the white enamel than it was when he put it in his hospital tank. Joseph wasn’t sure how the Doctor had gotten Ich, but this was the only cure he knew of. It had saved a few of his other fish from certain death in the past- perhaps it could save his employee’s life, too.

He closed up the bag and set it on top of the toilet cistern, then walked into the bedroom to survey the Doctor’s condition.

The man himself was whimpering, an arm thrown over his eyes, and Joseph’s heart clenched at the sight of his wounds. That looked disgusting and it must have been absolute agony.

Well, soon, it wouldn’t be a problem.

“C’mon, b’y. Up ya gets. We’ll have ya mended in a jiffy, ye just needs to get up…” Joseph said in a calming patter, reaching for the Doctor’s hands and trying to pull him up off the bed.

“What? I-“ the Doctor whimpered and started to mutter something in a strange, chiming language- something that sounded like a bell being struck at the bottom of a well. Joseph shuddered a little as the sounds hit his ears- there was something there in those words, something strange and unearthly.

Jesus, he really was a moonman.

“Where…going where?” the Doctor managed to croak, and Joseph pulled him up into a standing position and slung one of the man’s arms around his shoulders.

“Washroom.” Joseph grunted, “I drew ye a bath. Now, c’mon, b’y. Walk. That’s it…ye got it…”

"A...Bath?" the Doctor croaked, "That's...how...?" 

"I medicated it. I tink I knows what ye has. This'll help, might even cure ya. Now come on, b'y. Ye gotta walk."

That, apparently, was enough. The Doctor whimpered with every unsteady step, his legs shaky underneath him like a newborn calf- but it was enough. It was just enough to get them the five steps to the washroom.

Then, a problem. The Doctor grabbed the towel rack and let his forehead bump into the wall, moaning in pain- as Joseph looked up and down at the man’s trousers and socks and shoes.

Joseph locked up and clenched his jaw. Oh, fuck.

“Y…ye…need…gotta get out of those clothes.” Joseph said with a grunt, “I’ll…I won’t look.”

The Doctor nodded and Joseph turned around, folding his arms and clenching his jaw. Don’t think about it. Stone face. Stone face. He can’t know. He can’t know…

The small washroom was filled with the sounds of shuffling fabric, interrupted by the odd hacking cough and a renewed thump against the wall. The seconds ticked by, and Joseph risked a look at his watch. Three minutes to take off a pair of pants.

Oh, God…

“I can’t.” the Doctor croaked, “I’m sorry…”

Joseph swallowed and nodded.

He turned around and surveyed the scene with a cold, clinical eye. The Doctor had managed to get his pants undone and pushed down a little bit, and that was it. The remnants of his open undershirt were pushed down his arms where he’d gotten stuck, and Joseph locked onto that. That was safer. Safer ground.

He grabbed the undershirt and helped slide it off, letting it hit the decrepit floor with a thump. Forgotten, for the moment. With his back fully visible, the sores were obvious- it was just a miracle they hadn’t spread down his arms yet.

“I’s helping you, ya know? Helping. Because you’re sick. You’re sick, I’s helping. This will help ya. I’m not, not like, that. This isn’t a thing. I’m not doing this on purpose. You can’t-“ Joseph was babbling now, panic starting to leak out. There was a reason. The Doctor couldn’t know, but there was a reason-

“It’s alright.” The reply was soft and gentle, if a bit slurred, “It’s alright. I understand.”

Joseph tensed up a little as he grabbed the man’s trousers. This was it. He closed his eyes and pulled them down as far as he could, and mercifully his patient had the wherewithal to step out of them himself. Thank god.

Sores had opened up on the back of his thighs, and Joseph instantly dragged his gaze up to- to the ceiling.

“I’s not looking, it’s fine, ye just, it’s a medicated bath, an’- fish- Fish get ich, and when they gets ich, ya puts them in a bath with malachite green, and fish don’t wear clothes, so this isn’t a thing, this is-“

“Joseph.” The Doctor said firmly, “It’s alright. I understand. Please help me get these off, I can barely stand up straight.” It was a struggle for him to speak that coherently, and his shoulders slumped again as soon as he was done speaking.

Joseph closed his eyes, crouched down, and grabbed the edge of the loose-fitting boxers. Thank fuck for small miracles. He yanked them down in one swift motion, standing up and backing away.

“I’s not touching you, I’s not, it’s fine, I’s- I’s-“ This was it. He’d crossed the Rubicon, and the Doctor would turn around and he’d KNOW, he’d know, despite all Joseph had done to hide it…

The Doctor turned and attempted to stagger into the tub. Attempted, because he immediately tripped over his own feet and toppled over. Joseph could see his skull hurtling towards the rim of the bath, and he reached out and grabbed his arm, reeling him back before the Doctor could brain himself.

“Doctor-“ he croaked, looking away, “I’s gonna…let’s…”

Get it over with. Get it done and he could run away and hide.

Joseph helped the Doctor into the tub, doing his best to look anywhere other than the naked man in front of him.

The bathwater rose to nearly the edge of the tub as the skinny man displaced it all, and he groaned in pain as the chemical in the water started to act. Joseph opened one eye to look down at the Doctor’s chest- and his eyes went wide.

The whitish fuzz he’d seen before had changed its appearance now that it was suspended in the bath. Immersed in water, it looked nothing like Ich. Buoyed by the liquid, he could see long white filaments snaking away, like grass swaying in the breeze. This wasn’t spots- this was something else entirely.

“It’s okay, Joseph.” The Doctor said quietly, interrupting the man’s contemplations, “I won’t tell anyone.”

Joseph’s heart seized.

“B’y, no, you don’t- ya don’t get it, I’m not like that, I’s normal. I likes women just fine, it’s- I’m fine, alright? Just sometimes, I think stuff, an’- It’s fine. I just, if I stays away from da b’y’s I’m fine, right? It’s not-“

“There’s a word for that.” The Doctor grunted, “you’ll be okay. Things will change and you’ll be okay.”

“…They’ll change?” Joseph echoed quietly, his eyes wide.

“Yeah, sure. It’s gonna happen soon, just you wait. It’ll be okay. You won’t have to hide that part of yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you, Joseph.” He groaned and his head hit the back of the tub, taking a few deep breaths.

A bit of colour crept back into the Doctor’s face, and Joseph swallowed and nodded.

 _Things will change._ The moonman from the future told him things would change. Maybe. Possibly. 

But thinking about that was a dangerous road to venture down, and Joseph shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably. He trusted the Doctor, the man seemed like he wouldn't just run off to the police or the papers and rat on him, but- 

Fish! Illness, malachite green, helping people, helping his employee. Yes, right, that was a safe line of thinking, a safer place to be than thinking about himself and the future and other people. 

Joseph’s eyes darted back down to the whitish tufts on the Doctor’s chest. Captain Kidd had whitish spots on him…and Joseph had a book all about fishkeeping, with a whole section devoted to illnesses and diseases. If he was right, and the Doctor had picked it up from a fish, then that book was their only hope of figuring out what it was specifically.

Joseph stood up and took a step back.

“Doctor?” he said nervously, “Doctor, I gotta…I gotta run out fer…ten minutes. I’ll be back in a jiffy. You’ll be okay? Please?”

The Doctor rolled his head over and nodded.

Joseph swallowed. “right, okay, sure. Just…don’t…don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.” He backed out of the washroom, leaving the door open, and started scrambling around for his boots and keys.

The Doctor sighed, letting his eyelids droop a little.

There was a distant slam a few minutes later as Joseph closed the door behind himself.

And then the phone started ringing.

* * *

Martin’s lab was on the second floor, and it reminded Martha a lot of the old science building at her university. Except, while that building had been clearly ancient and decrepit, leaving one with the distinct impression that the asbestos demon lurked in every wall, this building was gleaming and new. The dated equipment in some of the open labs looked shiny and factory-spec, the pails of sand hadn’t hardened into a stonelike mass-

…and the entire place stunk of tobacco.

They passed by a dozen doors, some of which were occupied by classes of students going about their business. Students, she noticed, that were entirely composed of white men.

Every door it was a similar story, and the accents on the voices weren’t much help either. A bit of Irish, a dash of Scots, and that was your lot.

Martha shrunk in on herself a little. 

Martin walked proud and tall, completely oblivious to Martha’s machinations. He stopped in front of a lab with locked doors, producing a key and shoving it open outwards.

Martha followed him in, relieved that the lab was empty and clean. Open countertops, several fume hoods, and huge jugs of chemicals in a storage room just beyond them.

There were some lab coats and goggles sitting on pegs right by the door, and Martha dutifully grabbed one of each and slipped them on, then carried her precious cargo to the closest lab bench to take a look at it.

“Here.” Martin grunted as she was setting out the sample jars. She looked up to see him carrying a microscope over- a microscope that looked ancient, despite how shiny and new it was. He put it down on the bench with a thump- and then took a step back and folded his arms.

“Go on then, Doctor Martha. Impress me.” There was a faint smirk on his lips, and Martha had to bite her cheek to stop herself sassing him off.

She undid the microscope cord and plugged it into a socket on the bench, flicking it on and making sure it was still working. She looked up, and there was a selection of clean glass slides- she grabbed one, and put it down on a piece of paper.

Right, okay. Getting ahead of herself, there. Gloves. She needed gloves. No telling what the Doctor had contracted….

Martha grabbed some disposable gloves from the box at the end of the bench, acutely aware the entire time of Martin’s eyes boring into her. She spared a glance up and raised an eyebrow.

“You could offer to help, you know.” She said, and Martin shrugged.

“I’m the medicine guy. You’re the doctor. Diagnose your patient, Doctor Martha. And then we’ll see what I can do.” He said, still looking a bit smug. What a fucker. He was waiting for her to fuck up, no doubt.

Okay. Okay. She had this. Ignore the bastard. She had more training and better training than Martin Fucking Ward could ever dream of.

“Right, so…” she muttered, “Could be bacterial, viral, fungal, or a parasite. Gotta narrow it down first…”

Normally, she’d start with the symptoms to narrow the field, but in this case, it could be anything- even something alien, something she’d never seen before. If it WAS alien, she had a huge problem- because there’d be nothing on Earth or in her training that could prepare her to diagnose it…so hopefully it wasn’t a weird alien disease.

Martha looked up at Martin and raised an eyebrow.

“Do you have any agar plates?” she said, “I need some of them.” Martin dutifully nodded, walking a few steps away as he went to go get them, and Martha turned her attention back to the samples.

She needed to culture some of these samples to see if they were bacterial, see if they’d grow on agar. The problem was they’d probably need to incubate overnight, which…the Doctor might not have that long. Martha bit her lip. She still had her phone- maybe she should call Joseph and tell him to go get the Doctor some penicillin to be safe…

After. She’d do that after.

Martin returned then with several empty agar plates, letting them clack onto the countertop and stepping back into his observation role. It reminded her a little of an owl sitting on a fence post, staring wide-eyed at everything and looking about as stupid.

That thought made her snort, and she returned to the task at hand.

Bacteria was easy. Grab a sterile swab from the container, carefully open a jar and coat the end of the swab in the whitish stuff. Then open the agar plate and scrape it all over the agar, scuffing it up and trying to get good coverage. Then seal it up and mark the date, time, and name of the person whose culture it was.

There was an incubator in the corner of the lab, which was a little strange- why would a chemist need all of this stuff?- but Martha wasn’t going to ask questions. Martin had mentioned before that his lab was often used by undergraduates, so maybe that was it.

She popped her sample in the incubator and slammed the door, turning back to the bench.

Martin looked a little bit annoyed, which was strange; but, again. Ignore the idiot.

Okay. So, viral. She…she wasn’t sure how to deal with viral. Not in this decade. Not with the technology at hand. Normally she’d take a sample and send it to the lab where they’d run a Western Blot…but that meant having the antibodies and viral proteins to identify exactly what she was dealing with.

That, and a good Western Blot took HOURS to run.

Martha groaned, rubbing her forehead. How did people in the 60’s identify any new diseases? This felt like trying to write by chiselling the letters into a piece of marble with another rock.

Alright, well, she’d…she’d just ignore it for now. Assume it wasn’t a virus until all the others came up negative.

For the sake of her own sanity.

Martha leaned back and drummed her fingers on the counter. Ich. Joseph had said it looked like Ich. What the hell was Ich? He’d said it was a parasite- did he know any more than that?

She carefully peeled her gloves off, turning them inside-out, and tossed them in the trash, taking a step back and pulling out her phone. Dialed their apartment’s landline, beep beep beep, and then looked at Martin as it rang.

And rang.

And rang.

And rang.

Martha raised an eyebrow, pulling the phone away from her head. She’d told Joseph to watch the Doctor- where could he have gone? Their flat wasn’t that big, you could hear their landline phone throughout the entire apartment…

“He’s not answering.” Martha said nervously, biting her lip. “I don’t…”

“Maybe he left to go get some penicillin?” Martin suggested, and she sighed and hung up.

That was…concerning. Hopefully the Doctor was alright…

Well, whatever. He definitely wouldn’t be alright if she didn’t get this thing diagnosed.

Parasite. Joseph’s theory was that it was a parasite. She didn’t have any better ideas- his symptoms were strange and unlike anything she’d seen before. There was a whole galaxy of infections it might be, and she could spend a lifetime testing them all.

But if it was a parasite, under high power, she’d be able to see the animal causing the infection. She grabbed a distilled water bottle nearby and carefully wetted the slide, then grabbed a thin glass slipcover and carefully dropped it into place overtop of the wetted sample.

She slotted the slide onto the microscope’s stage with a drop of stain from one of the bottles on the bench- a dab of red stain, then a slipcover, just to fix the sample and make the contents more visible.

Right. Lowest power first, and get it focused…

Okay, nothing. Nothing but some gross looking blobs. Higher power, then.

She rotated the new piece into place, listening to it click, and twiddled the focus knobs.

A network of large spiderlike lines were distantly visible, but it wasn’t clear enough yet.

One more lens. The last lens on this old scope. If this didn’t show her what she needed, nothing would.

It clicked into place, and Martha peered in.

Twiddled the knobs.

Okay. So. That wasn’t a parasite.

She fiddled the stage around, left and right, up and down, and wherever she looked, the something floating in the water didn’t look anything at all like a parasite- at least not the ones she’d seen.

Joseph was wrong, then.

“It’s not Ich, whatever this is.” Martha said, straightening up. She bit her lip, eyes falling on yet another sample jar.

Bacteria were cooking away. Virus she wasn’t sure how to handle, so that could come last. It really didn’t look like a parasite, though she’d try it again with another sample if her next idea was a bust.

“Fungus.” Martha mumbled, looking at Martin.

“Do you have any potassium hydroxide?”

“What? Of course I do. What kind of chemist do you take me for?” Martin sniffed, tromping off to go get a bottle of it. Martha pulled the slide off the scope and looked around the lab for a biohazard bin, finding one on the wall and plonking it dutifully inside.

Martin came back with a small bottle of the stuff right as she was fixing the next batch of sample on a fresh slide. He plonked it on the counter, leaning in.

“So what’s this, then?”

“KOH test. I think it might be a fungus. It looked all weird and spindly on the last slide…this will just prove it. It’s just a hunch, but…”

Martin frowned.

“Fungus? If it’s a fungus, then…there’s some things, but they’re all really toxic…”

Martha shook her head, scraping the sample onto the fresh slide. Right, so, cover it with the KOH…like that, a few drops, and then let it sit.

She took a step back, twiddling her thumbs and checking the time on her phone. Five minutes.

“…Where did you learn all this?” Martin said after a long pause, and Martha quirked an eyebrow.

“What?”

“This. All of this. These tests. Diagnosing things. You…someone taught you all this. Who taught it to you?” Martin asked, raising an eyebrow.

“My professors. My textbooks. Me, when I was revising for my exams.” She said, folding her arms and staring him straight in the eyes.

Martin swallowed and looked away.

“…So…in the future…” he started, and Martha nodded.

“Yep. In the future, that’s perfectly normal. There’s lots of different people in every kind of class you could imagine. Everyone of different colours, all learning together.”

Martin swallowed, and turned away.

“Never…thought about that, before.” He mumbled, and Martha shrugged.

She turned back to her slide- it had turned clear. Perfect. A bit quicker than usual, she could have added heat or dimethyl sulfoxide, but whatever.

Right, next step. She reached up for the stains on the bench, skimming her fingers over them. The sample that she snatched up was marked COTTON BLUE. Martha dutifully added a single drop to the solution, watching the solid contents flush a dark blue as she did so. This microscope wasn’t fluorescent, so adding in calcofluor white would be useless, but whatever. This should work. Hopefully.

“That’s done.” She said, putting a fresh slipcover on it and putting it back on the microscope stage, “Now I just need to look for the hyphae, to confirm it’s a fungus.”

She could feel Martin’s eyes boring into her, for an entirely different reason now.

Martha fiddled around, peering in at greater and greater magnifications, until…

“Got you.” She muttered.

There, illuminated by the light from below, was a central seed with a network of trailing blue filaments stretching out all around it. The tips of the little filaments were full to bursting with strange circular spores, but it didn’t matter- this thing was a fungus, and the Doctor needed to know.

Trouble was, she couldn’t say much more than that. The specific species was a mystery to her- without a western blot, or any of the more sophisticated protein-detecting machines she’d been trained to order tests from, Martha wasn’t sure what to do. The symptoms weren’t a large help, either- gaping lesions and a persistent hacking cough, along with whitish filaments from each wound. It bore no relation to anything she could think of off the top of her head- certainly nothing human.

Joseph’s theory that it was Ich was conclusively wrong, but the old man might still be on to something.

Still. They didn’t have much time.

Under the circumstances, she had to ignore normal procedure. Right now, they needed to carpet-bomb this thing with a generalized antifungal, because those skin lesions and the coughing were worrying signs that the infection was systemic. 

She straightened up, peeled off her gloves, and pulled out her phone.

And listened to it ring. For minute after agonizing, terrifying minute. She looked at Martin with worried eyes, biting her lip.

Where was he?

* * *

The Doctor could hear the phone’s discordant screeching from the next room, ringing and ringing and ringing without end.

He could hear it. Distantly.

The water was warm, and the chemical fizzed against his wounds like pop rocks in the mouth. The sores hurt with a faint pulsing ache, a pain he could easily ignore.

The water was so warm.

He was so tired.

His eyelids began to droop as the exhaustion started to seep into his bones. Some small part of his mind gasped in a mighty breath of air, socking it away in his tissues, just in case, just in case…

The ringing of the telephone grew muffled as his ears slipped under the water.

The Doctor’s eyes closed a second later as the bathwater crawled over his nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one for the list. I was kinda iffy on this one, I hope you like it. There's a lot going on here and I did my best to keep it balanced. 
> 
> Anyway, more science next time. Um. Yeah. 
> 
> Oh, and important side tip: malachite green is absolutely an effective and safe treatment for ORNAMENTAL fish. DO NOT USE MALACHITE GREEN ON FISH RAISED FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. Don't do it. You'll poison people. Then again, if you're taking fishkeeping advice from a goddamn fanfic, you've got bigger issues. But keep that in mind, I won't be held responsible for any poisonings.
> 
> If you liked it, leave a comment and let me know your thoughts. I tried real hard on this one, hopefully it's okay.


	5. Decline

The Doctor was floating.

Everything was murky and quiet, any noise muffled by the warm water all around him. Perhaps this was what it was like, being in a womb, he mused; was this what all humans went through?

Everything was dark and quiet; a distant jangling dripped down to him through the flickering patterns of the water overhead. Half-glimpsed through hooded lids, a slight sting against his eyes and a faint taste of chemicals and metal on his tongue. This warm water was not pure, but the pain…the pain was gone.

Every blink was a struggle, a pause of blackness lengthening each time. Something ironic there, he thought; telling Sally Sparrow not to blink and here he was being downright greedy with them…

He needed something…something….

Air?

He tried to raise his head, tried, but the warm water and the raging illness had leached all the strength out of his bones. Air was so far away, and it just…seemed…unimportant…

A distant bang jostled the water, and the Doctor mumbled, his words bubbling up and floating away. Water in his mouth, a taste of metal- Yuck.

His lungs were really starting to burn now

Another bang, louder, closer, ripples on the placid bathwater jerking away from the source. Something muffled- shouting?

Strong hands plunged into the murky gloom and latched onto his shoulders, yanking him up into the air, and he gasped mightily- once, twice, strength and clarity flowing into his veins with each breath.

“-you fucking drown on me! Don’t ye fuckin’ DARE, b’y! Breathe! Breathe, Doctor, come on-“

Those arms hauled him up, up, up, out of the tub and onto the floor, the cold air stinging his skin and burning the wounds. Turned him sideways so he was laying on their bathroom mat-

The Doctor coughed, a torrent of water pouring out of him, once, twice, three times; he relaxed and took a few deep breaths.

“Doctor? Fuck, Doctor, I’m so sorry, I had ta get me book-“ Joseph was babbling, now, and a towel fluttered down from above and draped itself over his body, over his chest and his hips, down to his thighs.

“Jo…seph?” The Doctor croaked, craning his neck up slightly.

The portly Newfoundlander’s face was the picture of guilt, etched deeply into the furrows of his skin. He knelt down, rubbing his forehead, and patted the Doctor on the back.

“Breathe, Doctor. Breathe. I’s so fuckin’ sorry. I just- I thought you’d be okay, I thought-“

The Doctor groaned and tried to push himself off the floor. 

Tried. His arms collapsed underneath him, and Joseph caught him before he could crack his face on the tile.

“Fuck, b’y…” Joseph was mumbling, his face as white as a sheet. He grabbed the Doctor’s shoulders and started to lift, pulling him up into a standing position.

“How the fuck aren’t ye dead? I was gone fer a full ten minutes, nobody can hold their breath that long-“ the babble was intensifying now, the Doctor leaning his full weight against his employer. They limped together out of the washroom, the few steps it would take back to the bed, stopping against the doorjamb so the Doctor could hack up a lungful of phlegm.

Each step was a dizzying challenge, a journey of a thousand miles in each footfall. The ground was so far away…

He tumbled for an eternity, landing in a nest of billowing white sheets that flew up all around him like startled pigeons. Joseph’s strong hands guided him onto his side, and he kept coughing. No more water, thankfully, but there was an awful lot of phlegm.

Finally, the Doctor groaned and turned his head to look up at Joseph.

The man’s face was utterly ashen, guilt and terror haunting his posture and gaze.

“B’y, look, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so, so fuckin’ sorry, I just- I had ta get me book, an’ I panicked, an’ I wasn’t sure what to do, and-“

The Doctor closed his eyes and panted a few times.

“It’s fine,” he mumbled, “I understand. You panicked.”

“I- what?” Joseph spluttered.

The Doctor nodded against the now-soaking bedsheets.

“You panicked. Didn’t want…be around me. It’s fine. I get it. Stuff like that takes…a long time to unlearn.”

“B’y, I have no idea what the fuck you’re on about. Ye’s delirious. Are-“

Joseph swallowed. The towel was still loosely draped over the Doctor’s waist, and he leaned in to look at the gashes on his chest. To Joseph’s amazement, the whitish growths had subsided significantly- in fact, most of it had sloughed off, presumably floating in the bathwater. The wounds still looked grisly, but there were clean- a welcome change. The Doctor was on the mend.

…Was what Joseph was about to say, right up until said Doctor started hacking his lungs back up.

“Fuck. Thought da malachite green would do da trick, but…” Joseph ran a hand through his hair, tamping down on the panic and guilt he was feeling. Training, stick to your training. Think, don’t panic.

The phone rang, a blessed intrusion, and Joseph took the opportunity to run out of the room and straight for it. His book on fishkeeping was sitting on the table in the hall, and he snatched it up before yanking the phone off its cradle.

“Hello?”

“Joseph!” Martha snapped, “Where the hell were you? I’ve been calling and calling-“

“I- I had to get me book.” Joseph mumbled, swallowing a lump of guilt. He’d nearly drowned a man with his carelessness. He needed- he needed to make things right.

“Your book?” Martha echoed, and he could practically hear the raised eyebrow.

“Yeah. Me book on fishkeepin’. Has…stuff on diseases an’ stuff. B’y, I tinks it’s ich, like I told ya, ‘cause me fish captain Kidd, he’s got the same thing, right? White shit growin’ out of holes in his scales, lethargy, an’- I ran the Doctor a bath a’ malachite green, and…and…”

Joseph swallowed.

“…It, uh, helped. A lot. A bunch of da white shit’s fallen off, just…he’s still got a bad cough-“

Martha groaned.

“It’s not ich. I looked at it under the microscope. It’s a fungus. I don’t know what kind of a fungus, but I need to know a recipe for a generalized antifungal from the Doctor so we can start treating this. It sounds like you were able to treat the infection on his epidermis with that…malachite green?...so maybe…”

Joseph sat down on the floor, the phone cord stretched to its maximum length, and opened his book.

“Any human diseases treatable like dat?” he asked, flipping through the pages. Feeding, aeration, tank size selection…

Martha snorted. “Not after the 1800’s. You may be on to something. Any specifics on what it could be in that book of yours? If your fish has the same thing, then it’s very likely we’ve got a zoonotic infection on our hands… was the Doctor in contact with any of your fish?”

“Don’ know what half those words are, b’y…but yeah. He used ta feed ‘em, an’ he offered ta clean out da tank a week or so ago…”

“Fuck.” Martha muttered, “I bet it was in the water. He must have got it on his hands or inhaled some droplets or something…”

Joseph nodded, even though she couldn’t see, and turned over another page.

“Alright, got it. Disease an’ Treatment.” Joseph started to flick through the pages, scanning over each one in turn. The black-and-white photographs were blurry, but they showed enough detail that a positive identification could be made. Unfortunately, there weren’t many illnesses listed.

Ich, Dropsy, fin rot, vibrosis…and then there was the one at the end.

“Saprolegnia.” Joseph said slowly, scanning over it. The paragraph describing it was almost chillingly apt- fur-like white growths on the affected fish’s body…

“What’s a…I have somethin’, but it’s not a fungus, b’y. It’s an ‘oomycota’. That’s not a fungus-“

“Yes it is.” Martha said in surprise, “’oo’ means egg, but ‘mycota’ means fungus, so…egg-fungus. That tracks with what I saw on the microscope. Saprolegnia? You said it was saprolegnia? Can you describe what it does to a fish?”

“Uh…whitish, fur-like growths on da skin… says it doesn’t make deep lesions in the muscle of infected fish, though…”

“Yeah, but he’s not a fish, he’s a Time- uh. He’s not a fish. Wouldn’t surprise me if it started acting abnormally in a new host…since I’m pretty sure a fish disease wouldn’t know what to do with the lungs…” Martha muttered, and Joseph heard a faint scratching on paper as she wrote something down.

“So…what d’ya want me to do?” Joseph said quietly, and Martha hummed.

“Well…if it’s of earthly origin, then there’s probably an Earthly solution. Honestly, I’m relieved that it’s not some weird alien space disease...or a virus. I need you to go to the Doctor and tell him that we think it’s Saprolegnia, and we need his cure. Stat. Tell him it’s a fungus, tell him I think it’s turning systemic, and tell him I need something we can whip up in a lab in a few hours.”

Joseph stood and nodded pointlessly again.

“Alright, b’y. I’m on it.”

“Great. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.” And with that, Martha hung up.

Joseph looked down at the floor. He was still in his boots. Had been since he came running back into the apartment and heard the Doctor burbling, and he hadn’t had time to get out of them.

He toed them off and flung them at the door, grabbing a nearby notepad and pencil and stomping into the bedroom to shake the Doctor awake.

It was a few minutes of relaying the news, and the Doctor blinked blearily and groaned a little, letting his head flop back on the pillows. The wounds looked a lot cleaner now that they’d had a chance to dry, and the whitish tufts looked rather limp and anemic.

“Fungus…Saprolegnia…” the Doctor mumbled, “Um…oral…need a medication…uh… oh. Clotrimazole.”

Joseph wrote down _clowtrimzole_ and looked up expectantly.

“Martha needs da steps fer how you make it.” Joseph prompted, and the Doctor nodded slowly.

“Right, uh…right.”

Joseph’s pen was busy as he dutifully scratched off all the steps, and not a moment too soon. The phone started ringing pretty much the second the Doctor stopped talking, and Joseph turned towards the door.

And stopped.

“Hang in there, b’y. Help’s on the way.”

The Doctor’s only response was a low moan. 

* * *

Martha nodded, scratching her pencil against a loose sheet of paper as she wrote the final step down. The Doctor had seen fit to relay his instructions in terms of chemical shorthand, not the full names, sparing her a bit of writing. Still, this reaction was looking a bit on the nasty side. Couldn’t chemistry ever involve colourful jars like in the movies, and not hydrochloric acid?

“Okay. It’s clotrimazole, right?” Martha echoed, mentally wondering why the hell the Doctor had decided on that. It certainly wouldn’t be her first choice…but then again, it was a topical and oral antifungal, and it worked quite well for cases of thrush. So perhaps she shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

Martin stood by impatiently, leaning over her shoulder to get a look at the paper. She hung up, turning to her newfound lab partner, and offered the paper he’d been dying to get a look at.

“Here. He wants us to make him some Clotrimazole. Not the antifungal I’d pick for the situation, but I don’t know this disease very well, and it works for thrush, so…”

“Clotrimazole,” Martin muttered, scanning over the paper, “Interesting. Don’t think there’s antifungals like that on the market yet. Make some of this, then I run off and patent it…Alright, miss Martha. Let’s get to it.”

He ran his finger over the first step and smiled.

“He wants us to make some 2-chloro-tolulene first…” Martin said, “You’re in luck- I made some of that last week, it’s in the back someplace. What other reagents does he want…Aluminum trichloride, no problem, benzene, not a problem…”

His face fell suddenly.

“Imidazole. Um.”

Martha quirked an eyebrow.

“Don’t tell me you don’t have imidazole-“

“I- I don’t. But. The prof down the hall, he does have it. He’s. I’ll go ask for some later. When we get to it.”

Martin shook his head and cracked his knuckles, a sharklike smile spreading across his face.

“Well, Doctor Jones, you had your fun. Now I get to have mine.”

He strode to the other side of the lab, towards his fume hood, and flicked it on, grabbing glass beakers and tubing and pipes and all kinds of things Martha had used in her classes, each with a special name.

“Budge over. I’m helping.” She said, grabbing at some of the glassware and looking at the reaction on the page.

“Do you even know what you’re doing? I have a bachelor’s in chemistry. What do you have?”

“I’m training to be a doctor.” Martha said flatly, “You think I haven’t been in a chemistry lab before?”

Martin stared at her, and then sighed and rolled his eyes.

“You think you know what you’re doing? Go get me some hydrogen chloride and that 2-chloro-tolulene. This is my lab and my fume hood. You may be a doctor, Miss Martha, but I’m the chemist. And I have no way of knowing if you’ve even done those classes at all. You could be lying.” He grabbed a metal stand, a clamp, and a round-bottomed flask with two ports, and started to set up the apparatus.

Martha huffed and stomped over to where she’d seen the chemicals being stored, eyes flicking over the large selection of glass bottles on the shelves. Huge tanks full of basic chemicals with spigots in the bottom adorned the far wall, some full, some empty, and one with a note reading KEVIN DON’T TOUCH.

On the opposite wall, however, were rows and rows of glass bottles with screwed tops, each clearly labelled- however, none of them bore the safety symbols and other adornments that Martha was familiar with, so it took her a few minutes to grab the right containers.

One of hydrogen chloride, and one of 2-chlorotolulene. Both of them colourless liquids, and both of them potentially poisonous. Martin’s spiky handwriting adorned the label on the 2-chlorotolulene, with DO NOT TOUCH written angrily underneath it. Martha snorted and rolled her eyes. Who would be messing with someone else’s chemicals?

Martin had gotten the glassware set up by the time she returned, a round-bottom flask with a wad of steel wool in the bottom, a huge glass tube on top, rubber hosing connecting the other end of the round flask to an Erlenmeyer flask to collect the gas, and then another flask after that…

“Alright, that’s the setup. Let’s see if you grabbed the right chemicals…” Martin carefully took both bottles from her, examining them.

Martha took the HCl back and unscrewed the top without a word, reaching towards the glass tube above the round-bottomed flask and pouring it in.

“How much?” she asked, and Martin stared at her.

“What are you-“

“Making chlorine gas. That’s your chlorine generator, right? You mind turning on the heating mantle for me?”

“I- Sure. How much, you asked?” he asked, “This reaction…it doesn’t seem to matter. Lots. Fill it up.”

“Just chuck a bunch of that 2-chloro-whatever-the-hell in the other flask, then, and let’s get this show on the road.” Martha said firmly, and Martin rolled his eyes and grabbed a graduated cylinder to measure it out.

He poured the resultant clear liquid into the last flask in the row as Martha fired up the heating mantle, and the two of them stepped back and looked at their little creation.

Martin grabbed the instructions again.

“Catalyzed by UV light…I’ll get the lamp, then.” It was as he was turning away that Martha grabbed her cellphone and punched in the number for their flat.

Martin walked back a few minutes later with the heavy UV lamp in his arms, already opening his mouth to order Martha to plug it in, when he stopped dead in his tracks.

She had the phone pinned between her ear and her shoulder, and was leaning beside the last flask, fiddling with the weird silver magic wand she’d wanted to use on the jars earlier.

“Right, 14-tea-47?” she said, fiddling with it, “Okay, got it. And then 14-Tea-99 for the filtration. Got it. Thanks, Joseph!” With that, Martha reached up with her free hand and folded up her phone, pointing the magic wand at the flask and pressing the button.

The solution inside was bathed in a purplish light, and to Martin’s shock, white flakes began to instantly precipitate out of the solution. Like it was catalyzing the reaction.

“What-“ He let the lamp thump down on a nearby bench, “What the hell-?”

“Figured this could use a bit of a jump-start. We don’t have a lot of time. Joseph says the Doctor’s only getting worse. Can you get the next step set up, so we can just drop it in and go?”

Martin stared at her for a minute, nodding mutely, and reaching back into the glassware drawer.

Martha got the distinct impression he wasn’t used to being ordered around. Tough shit.

The precipitate fell out of the solution like a snowstorm, whitish flakes blizzarding out of the clear mix and settling on the bottom in massive drifts. The sonic was speeding things up considerably- it was a miracle this reaction was catalyzed with light and not something else.

Martin was busy setting up a selection of beakers and flasks, grabbing at a hot plate and plugging it into the back of the hood. Like everything else in his lab, the tech was so ancient she’d seen it in a museum, but this one was pristine and shiny- a far cry from the hot plates Martha had used in her university courses.

She turned her attention back to the solution. They’d need to filter it out, and this stuff was mercifully poorly soluble in water…a quick vacuum filtration should do, which was what the second setting on the sonic was for.

The snowflakes of product were getting thin on the ground, their formation slowing down considerably- understandable, as most of the flask was full of it, the remaining liquid a thin layer on the top. Martha reached over and turned off the heating mantle, pulling the flask of product free of the tubing and clipping it closed to let the chlorine generator burn itself out.

Martin was busy setting up the next step, the chlorine generator was still idling down to nothing, and Martha checked the recipe again. Aluminum trichloride and benzene, and they needed to react the whitish powder they’d made with that. Looked like they could just chuck it into a beaker and stir.

She tromped back to the chemical room to grab the bottle of benzene and the aluminum trichloride powder, which took a few minutes of scanning over the racks and racks of containers.

When Martha emerged, Martin had finished setting up the vacuum filtration setup, and was busy hosing down the precipitate with distilled water as the suction roared away. Clear fluid gathered in the bottom of the filtration flask, and Martha put down her cargo and pulled out the sonic.

She twiddled it to the second setting the Doctor had mentioned and aimed it at the precipitate, and Martin watched with wide eyes as a gush of liquid that had been hidden in the powder came dripping out of the bottom of the spigot. Martha kept the sonic down in the cup until the dripping stopped- and they were left with a filter paper covered in a fist-sized amount of white powder.

“That’s…that’s impressive.” Martin said, “Where did you find the magic wand, anyway?”

“Don’t know. The Doctor made it himself. Like I said…he’s not from around here.” Martha started unclipping the tubes, and Martin grabbed the benzene and started to fill the beaker. The next step, near as they could tell, was chucking everything into a beaker on a hot plate and stirring.

“He might be a space alien, but you’re not.” Martin mused. Martha decided not to comment.

She shook the powder into the beaker, grabbing a little metal spatula and scraping the dregs off as well. They were lucky to have the sonic to speed things along- otherwise, both the preceding steps would have taken an hour apiece to get a decent yield.

The white powder drifted down into the benzene like snowflakes, melting into the mix as they sank. Martin grabbed a scoopful of aluminum trichloride and tossed it in, then fished a magnetic stir bar out of one of the drawers- it looked like a little white pill. It hit the benzene with a SPLOOP, and sank to the bottom slowly. With the press of a button and the click of a dial, it was spinning a vortex into the beaker’s contents- and the hot plate warmed.

“Alright. And we leave that, until the 2-chlorotriphenyl methyl chloride has precipitated out. That might take awhile.” Martin said, looking over the paper where Martha had made her notes. Every single step, converting one white powder into another white powder with various clear, colourless poisonous liquids. The magic of chemistry.

“And after that, it’s the imidazole, right?” she said, “Okay. Who’s the professor who’s got it? I’ll nip down the hall and ask him if we can have some.” And then Martin could get the next setup built, get all the glassware into place- they didn’t have a lot of time, and it would cut down on any fumbling between stages.

Martin’s expression hardened and he looked at the floor.

“You can’t go ask him.” he said flatly.

“What? Why not? You’re better at chemistry than I am, you can get the next stage of it set up, while I-“

Martin took a deep breath and gestured at Martha’s person.

“Martha. You can’t ask him. He won’t give it to you. He might give it to me.” Martin said flatly.

Martha’s face fell.

“…oh.” She said. Her posture stiffened, and she took a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t Martin’s fault.

“I’ll go ask him. Watch the reaction.” Martin took a few steps towards the door, and then stopped.

“…I’m sorry.” He said quietly, and stepped into the hallway.

Martha sighed, and turned back to the beaker.

* * *

Joseph walked back into the bedroom with two mugs of tea, one in each hand. Tea was the best cure, his mum had always said, and the Doctor clearly needed it.

He’d pulled a kitchen chair up to the man’s bedside and covered him up with the blankets, trying to make him comfortable- hopefully, it was enough.

“Doctor? I brought you tea.” Joseph said.

All emotion drained off his face when he saw the man’s colour.

The Doctor was panting, gasping for air, and coughing every other breath. His eyes were closed, and Joseph set the two mugs down with trembling hands and tried to shake him awake.

“B’y? Doctor! WAKE UP!” he yelled, shaking the man’s shoulders.

No response.

Joseph bit his lip and took a step back.

Oh, this was bad.

* * *

The door to the chem lab banged open a few minutes later, just as Martha was disassembling the vacuum filtration setup, and she looked up with a comment to Martin about how that had been quick.

It wasn’t Martin.

Some other bloke with green eyes and more freckles than was reasonable came strolling in with a book under his arm, already in his lab kit. His eyes fell on Martha, and for a moment they locked eyes and nobody said anything. She could see in his posture, in his face- his mind was working, she could see the eyebrows going up-

And then the man smiled. Genuinely, a warm, cheerful smile.

“Hello there!” he said kindly, “Oh, that’s brilliant, that is. Here, give me a second.”

“Uh-“ Martha started, but the man was already walking towards another bench.

Before she could speak, he picked up a tray of dirty glassware that was sitting in a plastic container and walked over to her, offering the pallet to her. Martha took it, confused, and opened her mouth to ask what was happening-

“Really thoughtful of Martin to get some help for the lab! I need all that washed by this afternoon, but there’s no real rush on the beakers- I will need the Erlenmeyer flask cleaned right away, though, so-“

“No!” Martha snapped, shoving the box back in the man’s arms. The beakers and test tubes rattled, and she folded her arms and scowled.

“Wash your own bloody glassware! I don’t know who you are, but I’m not cleaning that for you! I’m busy!” Martha growled, taking a few deep breaths and turning back to the fume hood to finish her disassembly. The suction filtration flasks needed to be cleaned so they could use them again, and she did not have time for this asshole and his games.

The pallet of glassware clanked as the man put it back down on the opposite bench.

“…Then…if Martin didn’t hire you…why are you here?” The man said slowly. Martha sighed and turned around.

“I’m here because I’m doing some work. Do you mind?” She snapped, walking the ceramic filter cup over to the sink on the end of the row and rinsing it out. Water ran out of the spout at the bottom, and Martha reached for the distilled water for the second wash.

The man frowned and watched her work. He folded his arms and walked towards the door.

The lab door banged open, and Martin stepped inside with a small jar in his hands.

“Martha, I’ve got the- oh. Anthony, what do you want now?” Martin sighed.

“What’s she doing here?” Anthony gestured at Martha, “I thought we agreed we’d hire a lab assistant, and you did, but just for yourself?” 

Martin blinked a few times and took a deep breath.

“Anthony? Get the fuck out. She’s my partner for today. Now get out.”

“What-“

“We’re doing…we’re doing an azide reaction. Do you still want to stay here asking stupid questions?” Martin snapped.

Anthony’s eyes went wide. He grabbed his book and scrambled out of the room without another word, closing the door behind himself with the utmost care so it gently snapped shut.

“…Okay, that was…something.” Martha said with a few blinks, “Azide reaction?”

“Azides. Highly reactive compounds…in an explosive way. He’s an organic chemist, so I knew that would send him packing.” Martin said smugly. He held up his prize- a small tub of whitish powder- and shook it.

“Anyway. Got the imidazole. How’s it looking?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah. Yeah, now you understand. I turned the internet upside-down and shook it violently, and all that came out were two chemical diagrams and a paper on an Indian clotrimazole factory. I then had to go and talk to Lastbluetardis to get her expert opinion on the chemistry. I also handwaved a lot of the more technical stuff because of pace and storytelling and accessibility and shit. I hope you understand. Other than that, science is all accurate. Look forward to some picture diagrams at the end with the rest of my sources! 
> 
> I tried my damndest on this chapter, so I hope you like it! School is starting to pick up, so if there's any delays, that's the reason why. I'll try to keep them to a minimum, though. 
> 
> Let me know your thoughts- and go check out [Lastbluetardis!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastbluetardis/pseuds/HiddenTreasures)


	6. Convalescence

Lines and colours drifted all around him, voices and shapes and patterns. Frightening blacks and reds darted at the periphery of his vision and a garbled voice spoke distantly to him. English, he knew the language’s name, but not what the words meant- not right now, not when his thoughts were so scrambled. He mumbled to the speaker in his native tongue, begging for help- but nothing happened.

Lines lanced through the blackness, each one in lockstep with a spike of pain. Heat suffused his entire body, and wriggling to try to make the things pressing down all around him get off was useless. Pain tore at his skin with every jerk, and the Doctor could do little more but whimper.

He drifted back into the blackness, the garbled voice still shouting at him from somewhere high above.

* * *

Combining the imidazole into what they had so far had proved to be another step much like all the others- a round-bottomed flask, an excess of toluene, and more imidazole than they probably needed dissolved into the mix. A quick hit with the sonic from overhead to knock the white flakes out of the solution, and Martha watched in some slight awe as the clotrimazole fluttered to the bottom of the flask.

There, in a sea of poison, was the Doctor’s cure.

But it was still swamped in toluene and probably coated in impurities, and they had to fix that. Quickly.

“Martin? Get the wash step ready, if you would. And do you have a scale that goes out to four decimal places?”

Martin blinked at her, and then scoffed.

“Course I do. What kind of caveman do you take me for? You may be from the future, but we’re not banging rocks together.”

Martha shrugged as Martin pointed her at the scale, already about to apologize for jumping to conclusions- and the words died in her throat.

It was a beam balance with several bars with integrated weights, and a metal platform on the end for weighing out ingredients. They hadn’t been bothering to weigh out any of their ingredients, because with the Doctor’s life on the line, she was perfectly fine wasting material and saving time. But now she needed to take extremely precise measurements, and her only tool to do that was-

“That’s a beam balance.” Martha sputtered, “that’s- I-“

“That scale was imported from Germany,” Martin grumbled, “that’s top of the line. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a beam balance!” Martha protested, “Please, PLEASE tell me you have a digital scale around here somewhere-“

“A…digital…scale?” Martin echoed, immediately looking down at his fingers.

“Yes. A scale that can measure things to four decimal places. Because I need to measure out the dosages, because if we just chuck all this into his mouth all at once, it’ll kill him!” Martha protested.

Martin blinked a few times, his face the picture of confusion.

“What was your proposed dosage?”

“Ten milligrams. Pretty standard dose for clotrimazole when you’re giving it to an adult human orally…though, you’re usually treating thrush or candida or something else. Not...not a fish fungus. I…I’m HOPING he’ll have a little more wiggle room, but…” Martha bit her lip and reached out to touch the weigh scale.

The beam balance had three sliding knobs, which were mercifully marked for ten grams, grams, and milligrams. Okay. Maybe this…maybe this could work. She experimentally slid all the weights to zero and watched the scale bob and level out. Then flicked the bottom weight to ten milligrams, and watched it bob again, the metal disk rising up and the arm bobbing down. Slightly.

Martha bit her lip. She was entrusting the Doctor’s life to a collection of springs and beams on a pivot. To measure dosages that were usually weighed out by computers in a cutting-edge facility.

She took a deep breath. Testing. She needed to test it.

On a bench on the far wall was a small box full of tiny glass sample jars with plastic tops. They looked brand-new and untouched, but nevertheless, she picked one up and turned to Martin.

“These things. Have you used them?”

“Hmmm? No. Those are for overnight storage. You throw them out when you’re done. Why?”

“I’m gonna need…all of these.” Martha said, grabbing the small box and carrying it back to the scale. “We’ll split the powder up into ten-milligram doses and put them in these jars. Not like we have a better alternative.”

“And method of delivery? There’s no way he’ll be able to swallow a jar full of powder.” Martin said, another piece of the filtration setup clanking into place.

“We’ll…we’ll just have to dissolve it in water. I think. I hope.” Martha muttered, weighting one of the jars experimentally on the scale. About two and a half grams, according to the balance. That… _seemed_ correct, but she’d never know for sure…

Martha bit her lip and closed her eyes. She was trusting a lot of things to be accurate, wasn’t she? The Doctor’s directions, Martin’s skills, the chemical purity, their methods, the sonic…

And it all came down to measuring out the dosages on this old weigh scale.

She took a deep breath.

It had to work. It had to be good enough.

She didn’t have a lot of choice.

Martin slid the last part of the distillation setup into place and turned up the heating as much as he dared. Martha stepped up next to him, close enough to feel his heat through their lab coats, and turned up the sonic to the setting Joseph had relayed to her.

She pressed it against the glass and hit the button, and the buzz filled the air.

Toluene vapour started to boil off the top at a disquieting pace, soaring through the distillation setup and condensing instantly on the sides of the water-cooled pipe. It dribbled down into the collection flask at a rate that had Martin’s eyebrows reaching for the ceiling- less a dribble and more a torrent.

“I want a magic wand,” he spluttered, “Tell your Doctor I’ll buy it off him. Any price. My father can write him a cheque for anything he wants. We have a cabin on the St. Lawrence, he can have it-“

“It’s not for sale,” Martha said firmly, “Don’t push your luck. You’re keeping the formula after we’re done here, remember? That’s your payment.”

Martin sighed and nodded.

“I suppose…”

They settled in to watch the distillation, which thanks to the sonic, was a little more energetic than usual. It was a matter of minutes before the remaining cloudy solution stopped its relentless bubbling, and settled off into a semi-solid sludge.

“Right…that was…quick.” Martin said, shaking his head. He gestured at the filtration setup he’d put together- essentially a funnel with a piece of filter paper at the bottom, perched on a conical collection flask, with a spigot to pull a vacuum using a water hose. He cranked on the vacuum, and Martha slipped on a pair of thick oven-mitt type gloves to take the filtration setup apart. The sludge slid out of the piping-hot round bottomed flask only after some coaxing and a quirt of filtered water, until it was sitting on the filter paper in the funnel and dribbling into the bottom.

Martha switched sonic settings again, and blasted miniscule lump at full power- they needed multiple rinses and to let it dry overnight, according to the formula, and they flat-out didn’t have time.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Martin writing something on the corner of the paper.

“You said candida and thrush…yes?” Martin said with interest, and Martha rolled her eyes. The bastard was cheating.

“Yeah. And vaginal yeast infections.” She added smugly, watching as his eyes went very wide and he turned away.

There. That shut him up.

The sludge was starting to flake off into bone-dry powder as liquid dribbled off the bottom and into the collection flask. They needed it all, though, because their product yield looked rather tiny, and she was going to need a week’s worth of it, delivered orally five times daily, which worked out to…

…She didn’t have a pencil. Lots. She needed lots.

A few minutes later, the last of the liquid had dribbled off, and they were left with a filter paper covered in bone-dry pure clotrimazole. They’d skipped a few steps with the aid of the sonic- yet another thing Martha was trusting, but time was ticking- and she very, very carefully walked the filter paper over to the weigh scale.

It immediately thunked down with the addition of their product, and she nervously fiddled with the weights until it had balanced out again.

For a total yield of…five grams, including the filter paper, which weighed about a gram itself.

All those reagents, and they’d gotten five grams.

Martha sighed, and started scratching out some quick math onto the table. 350 milligrams across 35 jars. Looked like they had enough jars for that…and certainly enough clotrimazole. Right.

Time to play pharmacist, then.

Martin tapped her on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” Martha said, turning around. The look of nervousness on her face was shining through for certain- she knew, intellectually, how to use this weigh scale, but she certainly wasn’t trained on it…

“Doctor Martha?” Martin said quietly, “Are you training to be a pharmacist?”

“No?” Martha said after a moment’s pause, “I’m training to be a GP. Why?”

Martin smiled. “You’re not used to my equipment. And you’ve diagnosed your patient and prescribed a course of treatment. I think it’s only best we let the… _chemist_ fill the prescription, no?”

Martha blinked a few times, and then a small smile crept onto her face.

She took a step back.

“Doctor Ward, I think that would be an excellent idea.”

* * *

Joseph had tried absolutely everything he could think of. Cold flannels soaked with water, yelling at the Doctor’s sores, putting the contents of their spice rack in a sock and waving in the Doctor’s face, anything and everything his mother had half-mentioned as a cure or a remedy for illness.

And it wasn’t working.

The man’s temperature was climbing rapidly, from his usual corpse-coldness to almost-human. Almost.

He felt clammy, which was an improvement on how he usually felt, i.e. borderline dead.

Was it an improvement, though? It was definitely a fever, and Joseph didn’t know what he was supposed to do. His face was flushed a weird browny-red, and the man was sweating profusely- Joseph had never, ever seen the Doctor sweat, not even when he was bundled up under five layers and moving heavy TV’s into a truck for an hour and a half. Not once. And now he was absolutely drenched in it.

He put a hand to the Doctor’s forehead again, biting his lip. Still warm. Still REALLY warm.

Martha had said he wasn’t a human. He was a moonman. They were colder, on the moon, apparently. The Yankees had made a big to-do about getting to the moon, and the crazy bastards were really going to do it, too. Next month, they had it all set up and everything. They were going to the moon, and it was some cold up there. Maybe they’d find the Doctor’s family up there….god only knew why they’d kicked him out, but…

It didn’t matter. Moonmen were cold, the moon was cold, okay. So the Doctor feeling warm to the touch was…probably not a good thing. Almost certainly not a good thing.

Okay. So...

Joseph grabbed the cold flannel and draped it over the Doctor’s forehead, biting his lip. The man was muttering quietly, a strange musical language as he thrashed and twitched- something that resonated in Joseph’s bones and made him feel…strange.

It was unearthly, listening to him speak. A single word- _arkitior-_ was all Joseph could pick out from the musical ramblings. It sent a shudder down his spine.

Whatever the Doctor was seeing, it wasn’t pleasant.

Joseph stared at the floor, sitting in the kitchen chair he’d pulled up to the bed with his hands folded. He felt like a boy again, watching the adults run around and handle an emergency for him. Weak, and unable to help himself or anything else.

“Please wake up, Doctor,” Joseph begged, “Please…”

The phone started ringing, and Joseph sprang up and ran towards it, ripping it off the hook. He’d tried calling Martha for advice, but the switchboard operator had just connected him to some other Martha living two doors down, so that had been useless.

“Martha? B’y, I hope to god yer almost finished, ‘cause the Doctor don’t got much time left. He’s…thrashin’ and swearin’ and…b’y, he’s…warm. Real warm, for him. Almost feels like he’s a normal temperature, he’s that warm.”

Martha was silent on the other end of the line, processing that information.

“Okay, sounds…sounds like he’s having a fever dream. And a fever. Okay. Well, we’re done here, and we’ll be back in about…half an hour. Keep an eye on him, and…can you fill a glass of water? We need it about half full. Use the pint glass in the cupboard, please. Thank you so much-“ Martha sounded a bit harried, and Joseph nodded firmly.

“I got ya, b’y. Will do.” And he hung up.

The Doctor mumbled something incoherent from the bedroom.

Half an hour might be too long.

* * *

They threw all their dirty glassware in the nearest sink without bothering to clean it- time was of the essence, after all.

“Never liked cleaning this stuff, anyway…” Martin muttered, tossing one cracked flask into the glass garbage as Martha put away the last of the chemicals. They threw all the waste in the appropriate bins- that, Martin wouldn’t be moved on- and set off for the door.

Martha’s bag was clinking with thirty-seven tiny glass jars, each holding ten milligrams of clotrimazole. Enough for a full course of treatment, with two spare doses, just in case. Martin had dumped all the remaining clotrimazole powder into a large jar that was now sitting in his pocket, along with a carefully-folded copy of the recipe to make it.

Martha tossed the goggles and lab coat in the general direction of the rack and threw the lab doors open. Every second they spent on anything that wasn’t essential was another second the fungus had to devour more of the Doctor’s body’s resources, to multiply, and to infest his tissues. They were fighting a war, and they couldn’t let their enemy get entrenched.

Martin flicked off the lights and slammed the door closed, and Martha took off sprinting down the hallway. The jars rattled in her bag, and Martin caught up a few strides later, already panting and gasping.

“Why are we running?!” he protested, and Martha shook her head and grabbed his hand.

“No time! We’ve got to GO!” she yelled.

Martin just wheezed in reply.

They stomped down flight after flight of staircases, charging past a welcome desk and out onto the winding footpath and into the rain. Martha ignored it, yanking Martin towards his car- she could see it, just where they’d left it, sitting against the sidewalk. They didn’t have time.

Martin managed to fumble his car keys out of his pocket, and Martha ran to her side and started yanking at the handle frantically.

“Come on!” she yelled, “The button! Unlock it already!”

“…Button…?” Martin echoed, baffled. He stuck the key in the lock on the driver’s side, and the minute all the latches clonked down, Martha was in and buckling herself up.

Martin slid in smoothly, slamming the door closed and starting the car up with a flourish. He put it into gear and screeched out of his parking stall.

Unfortunately, the man’s safe and sensible driving came back at full force, and Martha found herself wishing for a more suicidal take on the rules of the road. If it got them there quicker-

“Can’t this thing go any faster?!” she spluttered, shivering and turning up the heater. They’d gotten drenched from the rain, and it wasn’t improving her mood any. The car had wind whistling in from every crack and seam, and it was chilling her to the bone.

“Yes.” Martin replied, “But we’re in a city. Slower is faster. And I like my car.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Right.” She shivered, as Martin stepped on the gas a reasonable amount and trundled them along.

Before, it had been a comfort. Now, with their cure in the bag, every second felt like she was failing her patient.

Martha gritted her teeth.

* * *

Martha slammed the door of their flat open with her side, body-checking it into submission, and stomped straight into the bedroom.

Joseph was sitting by the Doctor’s side in a kitchen chair, his thumb pressed into the Time Lord’s wrist- feeling around for a pulse point. On the bedside table was a half-full glass of water, just like she’d requested.

The Doctor, though…

He was shuddering and muttering in his language in his sleep, the word ‘Arkitior’ floating from his lips- she’d heard that word before, something he’d refused to translate, something the TARDIS had refused to translate. It probably meant nothing.

“You’re back!” Joseph said with relief, “He’s…I don’t know what’s up, b’y. He’s runnin’ a hell of a fever- almost feels like a normal person, now, but his heartbeat’s fine.”

“You’re taking that with your thumb. That’s wrong.” Martha said, grabbing the Doctor’s wrist away and feeling around with her two fingers, “Your thumb has its own pulse point, so that’s not his pulse, it’s yours-“

Her fingers dug in to his pulse point, and there was a surge of relief as she found it.

And what she felt was nothing like what Joseph had described.

“I tried listenin’ to his chest,” Joseph protested, “it just…sounded all wrong, so I tried his wrist-“

“Yeah. That’s cause he’s got two. And they’re both racing.” Martha could feel the quadruple drumbeat under her fingertips, buzzing away at a pace that- well, if he’d walked into her unit with a symptom like that, she’d suspect amphetamine use. His hearts were up near the redline, and that wasn’t good at all.

She dropped the wrist and grabbed her bag, trembling hands pulling out one of their premeasured jars full of powder. Joseph grabbed the glass and a spoon, holding it up so she could easily drop the clotrimazole in- Martha tapped the tiny jar against the rim of the glass, watching as the Doctor’s salvation tumbled inside.

All of it, save a few flakes, and that- that didn’t matter. She pulled away, and Joseph dutifully stirred it up, handing the glass back to Martha and standing up so he could haul the Doctor into a sitting position.

This was met with a pained screech, which she ignored. He was upright, she had the glass of water…

Martha pressed it up to his lips, praying to God almighty that he’d have the wherewithal to drink it-

And to her immense relief, the Doctor started to swallow as the solution slipped into his mouth. She watched him drink, keeping a careful eye out for any signs of choking- under normal circumstances, she’d get an IV line in his vein, or a NG tube, or literally any other way of doing this that didn’t involve almost waterboarding the bastard, but-

…but it was June 1969, and she was in a small, shitty flat, with no resources more advanced than a cup and crossed fingers.

Glug, glug, glug, he swallowed every last drop, and Martha pulled the glass away, looking down at the liquid that had slopped out and landed on his bare chest, contacting one of the sores. A sore that-

Hold on.

Martha pulled the blanket back, looking over the Doctor’s body, and her eyes went wide.

The lesions looked…clean. Remarkably clean. The whitish fungal growths were gone, leaving just terracotta-red gaping wounds that already looked far healthier.

She turned her head to look at Joseph, eyes wide.

“When did the infection clear off the wounds?” she spluttered, and Joseph beamed.

“I ran him a bath a’ malachite green.” He said proudly, “It worked, eh?”

“Yeah, it…it did. At least for the external infection. That’s…hmmm.” Martha swallowed. “It really is saprolegnia, then…”

Silence fell as the Doctor lay there. To Martha’s relief, the flush on his skin started to fade, and the pained expression on his face slowly fell away. His eyes were still closed, and he was still panting, but…it was a start. It was a step in the right direction.

There was an awkward cough from the door, and Martha turned back to see Martin standing against the doorjamb in his stocking feet.

“So…that’s it, then?” he asked, taking in the crowded confines of the flat’s tiny bedroom, “You’ve got your cure, then?”

Martha stood up, still holding the empty glass, and swallowed. She put a hand to the Doctor’s forehead- he was still alarmingly warm, but his skin felt a lot drier, and the unnatural heat was starting to ebb away.

“I…I think so. He’s not going to be mended, not right away…and we’ll need to give him the full course of medication, but…”

She looked up and looked Martin in the eyes.

“I think it’s done.”

The young man nodded, and walked across the room, his socks crunching across the worn carpet. Martha opened her mouth to ask what was going on, until he stuck out a hand towards her.

Wordlessly, she took it.

They shook.

“It was a pleasure working with you, Doctor Jones.” Martin said calmly, “I won’t let you down. I’ll take this formula and I’ll make sure it gets to the people who need it. So…thank you.”

He turned to Joseph and inhaled deeply, wordlessly offering his hand again.

Joseph stood and took it.

“Fatass.”

“Frog.”

They both smiled, and Joseph sat back down heavily.

Martin turned to leave, then, stopping by the door, and glanced over his shoulder.

“Repose-toi bien.” he said to the Doctor, and with that, Martin walked to the entranceway. He stopped to pull his trendy sneakers back on, and then he was gone, the front door closing behind him. 

“You can go too, if you need to, Joseph.” Martha said, “You’re probably pretty busy. I’ll look after him.”

“You sure?” Joseph said dubiously, “I can stay if ya likes…”

Martha shook her head. “You’ve already done more than you needed to. I can’t thank you enough. I- The Doctor owes you his life.”

Joseph’s face darkened.

“No he doesn’t. I nearly drowned him.” He said darkly, turning away, “I…I left him. Alone in da bath. I went ta get me book, and he…”

Joseph swallowed, and turned back to see Martha’s horrified expression.

“So. I…I owes ya one. If ya needs anything, just…call da shop.”

Martha nodded.

“I will. Joseph…” She inhaled, “…Just don’t do that ever again with anyone else, got that?”

He chuckled darkly.

“Oh, yes, b’y. Won’t happen again.”

With that, he turned, stopping by the door, and looked back at the Doctor.

“Tell him I says ta get well soon, fer his own sake.”

“I will.” Martha promised.

“Alright. Take care, Doctor Jones.” Joseph turned and walked over to the door, taking a few seconds to slip his boots back on and do up the laces.

A few minutes later, the door closed with a click, and he was gone.

Martha collapsed into the chair by the Doctor’s bedside, rubbing at her forehead, and sighed deeply.

What a nightmare. What a shitshow. He’d nearly drowned, nearly died from some fish fungus, and they’d been stranded here so long that she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to save him if this had happened any earlier.

And that was assuming the course of clotrimazole even worked at all. His temperature was dropping, which was a good sign, but…what if they were wrong? What if, after all this, it wasn’t saprolegnia, but some weird alien disease? What if they all got it? What if-

A groan from the bed interrupted her doom-mongering, and Martha snapped her head up.

The Doctor blinked a few times, tilting his head ever so slightly to look at her.

“Did you miss me?” he croaked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, just the epilogue remains. And the reference list. No, I didn't forget. It, too, is done, although it's missing a few things because this is a fanfic and not a term paper, so I wasn't as careful in saving every last one of my sources. Also I wasn't in the mood to cite my textbook but rest assured I referenced it too. 
> 
> Thank you Wy for saving me with britpicking. 
> 
> A short epilogue next week, and then I'll take a break and tinker with my next fic! I hope you're all excited for that, because I certainly am. 
> 
> If you liked this chapter, let me know and leave a comment! Comments are fanfic fuel, and it's been great to see the responses so far, even if i'm crap at replying. I promise you I read and appreciate them all, it's just i'm usually on my phone when it happens so it's hard to give every comment the response it deserves. Thank you so much!


	7. Epilogue

_ One week later… _

The Doctor chugged the contents of the glass, setting it on the counter with a clank. At the bottom lay a few flakes of whitish powder- clotrimazole, as it turned out, didn’t dissolve very well in water. He reached in with his long fingers and scraped them out, licking the abominable-tasting medicine off his fingertips with a grimace.

The foul brew had saved his life.

Martha was busy packing her meagre belongings into one of the two cheap bags they’d purchased- anything they wanted to keep went in the bag. There wasn’t much. The Doctor couldn’t see himself needing any of these chintzy cups ever again, let alone their ratty sheets or bent forks. Their crockery and other things, Martha had stuffed into the second bag- for what, she wouldn’t say.

He looked down at himself, pulling on the collar of his shirt to look down at his chest. Even in the blue gloom under the fabric, it was clear as day how much his condition had improved. The sores were still there, but they’d all shrunk- it was like someone was pulling on the zipper tab for each one, slowly closing them all up. They still hurt, but not the lancing, burning pain from before- clothes didn’t rake at his skin, and he could stand up and move around.

On the stove beside him, a skillet of bacon and eggs was sizzling. Martin had come round a few days prior, dancing up and down with glee on his face- he’d been to the patent office and was in the process of finalizing his claim on the recipe. As a way of saying thank you, he’d been bringing them food…which mostly consisted of bacon, eggs, and sandwich ingredients.

“You’d think a guy who studies medicine would know the importance of good nutrition, but I guess that’s chemists for ya,” Martha quipped, nodding at the skillet. She grabbed a wooden spoon and stirred at the bacon before it burned.

The Doctor watched, and smiled.

“Martha…” he started, “I never did say. Thank you. For…for everything. You saved my life.”

Martha dropped the spoon and looked at him with a tired smile.

“I know. You say that like I had the choice to just walk away.” She shook her head, “I’m just glad the treatment worked. I was terrified that it wouldn’t, that I’d made the wrong medicine…”

The Doctor spread his arms.

Martha accepted the embrace. It was awkward- it always was- but…

They broke apart, and she turned back to the now-smoking bacon and rolled her eyes.

“Hope you like it extra crispy. When’s zero hour, anyway?”

The Doctor checked his watch. “Soon. Very, very soon. Three hours, tops.” His face split into a wide, giddy grin, and he bounced on the balls of his feet in excitement.

Martha couldn’t help but smile in relief. Home. Back to the TARDIS. Back to the stars. The Doctor’s attitude was infectious, it was hard not to get excited herself.

There was a knock on the door a few minutes later, just as Martha was biting into a thin briquette that had once been a strip of meat.

“Ah! I’ll get it!” the Doctor said cheerfully, getting up and leaving his uneaten charcoal resting on their tiny kitchen table.

The door swung open, and Joseph stepped inside, kicking his shoes off carefully and shoving them in the corner.

“Doctor! Look at you, eh? Ya looks a million times better!” Joseph said with a broad grin, gesturing at his erstwhile employee, “Right glad ta see ye’s up an’ about, me son. Listen, if ya can let me know when you’ll be ready ta get back ta work, I’s up ta me eyeballs in repairs an’ none of the other b’y’s hold a candle ta yer skills-“

The Doctor held up a hand to cut him off, a sorrowful smile on his face.

“Joseph,” he said calmly, “I need to tell you straight off the bat that I’m not coming back to work. It’s been lovely, and I’m very grateful, but I won’t be available after today.”

Joseph frowned.

“Why not?”

“We’re leaving!” Martha called, plonking their bag by the door, “and about damn time too. Months we’ve been stuck here, no money, no papers-“

Joseph blinked a few times, and then sighed.

“Bollocks. Ye’s the best repairman I’s had in ages. Gonna have ta do half of it myself…again. Anyway…ye said ya had something for me?” Joseph said, folding his arms. He looked rather crestfallen that the Doctor was going, but didn’t say a word in protest.

The Doctor smiled and stooped down, grabbing two items that he’d left by the door earlier. A book and a bag of chemicals. He handed both to Joseph.

“You left these here. Wouldn’t want them getting repossessed when the landlord comes round to clean out the flat. There is one more thing, though…”

The Doctor gestured for Joseph to follow him, then waved his hand at the table.

Martha smiled at him and stopped by the sink to grab the last few dishes, cramming them into the second bag, and slipped out of the flat without another word. The door snicked closed behind her, and the Doctor and Joseph were alone. 

The Doctor filled two mugs with water from a pot on the stove, and carefully brewed up two cups of tea. Joseph took his with sugar, the Doctor took his with cream.

They sat down at the kitchen table, facing each other.

“You helped save my life,” the Doctor said, “and for that…I can’t thank you enough.”

Joseph’s face darkened, and the Doctor held up a hand to cut him off before he could start.

“I know what happened with the malachite green bath. It happens. You made a mistake, and I’m still here, so there’s no harm done. There’s just something I…I need to tell you.”

Joseph put his mug down and took in the Doctor’s change in expression and demeanour. He’d straightened up, turned quite serious indeed.

“There’s something coming. Not now, not for a few years or so. But it’s…it’s a disease.” He said quietly, “You need to protect yourself from it. It’s going to come, Joseph, and I hope when it does you’ll be in a better place and happier with yourself. But when it comes…you must take precautions.”

Joseph blinked a few times, the blood draining out of his face as he realized what the Doctor was saying.

“B’y-“

“Protection. Always use it. Start now and don’t stop. Demand it, always. It’s safer that way, anyway. Don’t ever,  _ ever _ share needles. And if you can avoid getting a blood transfusion, avoid it- that last is only after it’s in full swing, mind you. They’ll say it’s only for a specific group. They’re lying. Anyone can get it, but…They’ll blame guys like you. And  _ it’s not your fault _ . Remember that. It’s not  _ anyone’s _ fault. Understood?”

Joseph nodded, slowly.

“When?” he said quietly.

The Doctor swallowed.

“They’ll say it starts in 1981. They’re lying. It’ll get to the UK earlier than that. So…protection, don’t share needles. Do that, and you’ll be safe.” The Doctor said.

Joseph looked down at the table and nodded.

“Why are you tellin’ me this?”

The Doctor smiled.

“You helped save my life. The least I can do is return the favour.”

Joseph nodded solemnly and took a swig of his tea.

“Alright. I assume…if I start’s tellin’ people this…they’ll think I’m nuts, yeah?”

The Doctor nodded solemnly.

Joseph sighed, then looked up at him, rather ashen.

“It’s gonna be a disaster, isn’t it?” he said quietly, “Fuck me…”

“It’ll get better after that.” The Doctor promised, “It always does. Just…protect yourself, Joseph.”

The portly Newfoundlander nodded, and then smiled slowly.

“Thank God for moonmen from da future,” he said with a weak chuckle, “Don’t know what I’d have done…”

The Doctor shrugged.

“You’d have found your way. Humanity always does. I just…didn’t feel like leaving you to the twists of Time. Wasn’t…right.” He said quietly.

Joseph nodded.

There was a long, companionable silence as the two men drank their tea. Finally, Joseph looked up. 

“…So.” He said, “Where’s home?”

The Doctor swallowed.

“Home is…home…is a blue box.” He said finally, a half-hearted smile on his face.

* * *

Martha knocked on Martin’s door, rocking back on her heels. They didn’t have much time, and the Doctor was just wrapping things up with Joseph. She still didn’t know where the mad bastard had sent the TARDIS to, but knowing the Doctor, they’d be doing a lot of running to get there.

Martin answered the door with a scowl that quickly brightened.

“Doctor Jones! To what do I owe the pleasure?” he said cheerfully, and Martha thrust the bag of crockery, cups, pots, and pans in his direction.

“Here you go. The Doctor and I are leaving, and we’re never coming back.” She said with a smile, “I’m a student too, so trust me: I know what you want.”

Martin took the bag and peeked inside, his eyes going wide. He withdrew the still-dirty pan, and then took out a spare mug with a chip in it, and his eyes lit up greedily.

“All for me?” he said with excitement, “Oh, that’s magnificent! Yes! Thank you! Thank you so much!”

Martha smiled proudly, folding her arms. “Knew you’d like it.”

“Hold on a second. You’re leaving? Where are you going?” Martin’s eyebrows knitted in, “And not coming back?”

“Yeah. We’re…going home.” She said with a relieved sigh, “In about…two hours. Knowing the Doctor, we’ll be running. But that’s alright.”

“Home.” Martin echoed, and then his face lit up.

“Home’s the future, right?” he said, “Well, Doctor Jones, I won’t say goodbye for good. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Martha snorted. “You’ll be waiting a long time, Martin.”

“I’m sure.”

Martin offered his hand, and Martha shook it.

“It’s been a pleasure. I have to get back to my thesis- you really did ruin me, now I’m going to need to secure funding to prove this compound works!”

“Likewise. Good luck, Martin.” Martha replied.

“MARTHA!” the Doctor’s voice echoed down the hall, “It’s time to go!”

“Well, that’s my cue.” She said, “Goodbye, Martin. Take care of yourself. And eat an orange once in awhile, you’re going to get scurvy if you keep eating nothing but spam sandwiches!”

Martin huffed, but nonetheless waved her off.

Martha turned around to see the Doctor, with her rucksack, waiting expectantly in the hallway.

“So, what now?” She said, walking up to the alien madman.

The Doctor grinned and offered her his hand.

“Now? We run.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be honest: I did not think I'd get this done in time for today. But I did! It's a miracle. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this little trek through stupidly hard science, and I am now very tired and would like another break. I'm working on another big Nine story, but it won't be out until I'm happy that I have seven chapters in the backlog and they're all polished to my satisfaction, which may take a few weeks. 
> 
> This chapter was kindly looked over by [Isolus-Girl ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isolus_girl/works) and as always, the science consultant for this fic was the fantastic [Lastbluetardis!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastbluetardis/pseuds/HiddenTreasures) They're both on Ao3, so go check them out. 
> 
> Thanks to Wy for putting up with my bullshit and looking over my story, as well. Thanks man. 
> 
> Finally, thanks to you for reading this! And a big thanks to anyone who left comments and kudos. You're all wonderful and motivated me to keep writing this and keep my schedule. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because I tried very hard to bash hard sci-fi into Doctor Who. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the ride, and perhaps I'll see you for the next one!


	8. References

Casadevall, A. (2012). Fungi and the Rise of Mammals. _PLoS Pathogens,_ _8_ (8). doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1002808

Crasto, A. (2019, January 08). Clotrimazole. Retrieved August, 2020, from https://newdrugapprovals.org/2019/01/07/clotrimazole/

Molinari, E. (1992). _U.S. Patent No. 5,091,540_. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

P. (2007, September 17). Pre-Feasability report. Retrieved August, 2020, from http://www.environmentclearance.nic.in/writereaddata/FormB/TOR/PFR/28_Feb_2017_171623270GP2U5WMIPFR.pdf

Warrilow, A. G., Hull, C. M., Rolley, N. J., Parker, J. E., Nes, W. D., Smith, S. N., . . . Kelly, S. L. (2014). Clotrimazole as a Potent Agent for Treating the Oomycete Fish Pathogen Saprolegnia parasitica through Inhibition of Sterol 14α-Demethylase (CYP51). _Applied and Environmental Microbiology,_ _80_ (19), 6154-6166. doi:10.1128/aem.01195-14

The first paper, "fungi and the rise of mammals", was the primary inspiration for this fic. I recommend you check it out! 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> APA FORMAT AND EVERYTHING. BAM.


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